These are some incidents involving Irishmen in India. Included are extracts from an article by Thomas Bartlett, with pictures from various sources.

Kim

Father Victor stepped forward quickly and opened the front of Kim’s upper garment.

‘You see Bennett he’s not very black. What’s your name?’
‘Kim.’
‘Or Kimball?’
‘Perhaps. Will you let me go away?’
‘What else?’
‘They call me Kim Rishti Ke. That is Kim of the Rishti.’
‘What is that – “Rishti”?’
‘Eye-rishti – that was the regiment – my father’s.’
‘Irish – oh, I see.’

(from Kim, by Rudyard Kipling)

It was no accident that Kipling chose to give his eponymous hero an Irish military background. Kimball O’Hara’s father, we learn, had been a colour sergeant in the ‘Mavericks’ (regimental crest: ‘a great Red Bull on a background of Irish green’), and when time-expired had stayed on working on the Sind, Punjab and Delhi Railway. But he had subsequently lost heart and taken to “loafing up and down the line”, finally succumbing to opium and dying “as poor whites die in lndia”. The orphaned Kim, a child, took to the roads of Lahore as a vagabond but later met up with his father’s old regiment which took him in, found him an education, and gave him a role to play in the ‘Great Game’ of nineteenth-century India – British/Russian intrigues along the North-West frontier. Kim’s dilemma (born to an Irish regiment, white certainly, but reared as a native) was, however, scarcely resolved by his new career as an English agent: “I am Kim. I am Kim’, he wails, “And what is Kim?”

The adventures of Kimball O’Hara, and the many short stories by Kipling featuring Private, sometimes ‘Corp’ril’, Terence Mulvaney (motto: “Hit a man an’ help a woman, an’ ye can’t be far wrong anyways”) make the simple point that almost from the beginnings of British involvement in India, the archetypal Irishman on the sub-continent was neither missionary nor merchant, neither doctor nor administrator, but soldier. C. J. O’Donnell’s claim in 1913 that “India was the great prize of a Gaelic-speaking army recruited by the East India Company exclusively in Ireland under Irish generals” was, no doubt, grossly exaggerated: but it did contain a modicum of fact, for Irish soldiers and Irish generals had made (and continued to make) a disproportionate contrbution to the ‘steel frame’ around which the Raj was built.

A private of the Royal Irish Hussars on horseback, with a sepoy, around 1857.

The Army

From 1783 to 1806 men enlisted for life in the ranks of the British Army. Between 1806 and 1829 enlistments were seven years in the infantry and ten years in the cavalry. Sappers and gunners had a minimum enlistment of twelve years. In 1829, Parliament restored enlistments for life. In 1847 it was reduced to twenty-one years which still amounted to life in the ranks. In 1870, a short service was introduced and men who enlisted for twelve years spent three to eight years under colours, and the balance in the reserves.

Sir Henry Wilson, himself an Irishman, said, “…jack frost is the best recruiting sergeant we have.” Many men joined the army to put warm food in their bellys, clothes on their backs, and to have a roof over their heads.

The lot of the Indian soldier, in comparison, wasn’t as good as their European counterpart. For example, at one stage in the Bengal Army the 140,000 Indians who were employed as “Sepoys” were completely subordinate to the roughly 26,000 British officers. These sepoys bore the brunt of the First Britsh-Afghan War (1838-42), the two closely contested Punjab Wars (1845-6, and 1848-9) and the Second Anglo-Burmese War. They were shipped across the seas to fight in the Opium Wars against China (1840-42) and (1856-60) and the Crimean War against Russia (1854). Although at constant risk of death, the Indian sepoy faced very limited opportunities for advancement – since all positions of authority were monopolized by the Europeans.

The Duke of Wellington

Born Arthur Wesley in Dublin in 1769, he was the sixth child of Lord Mornington, professor of music at Trinity College. Young Arthur was sent to a school near Dangan Castle, their country home, and later to Eton. He appears to have been an indifferent student and a worse athlete, so his mother had him tutored and then sent to Brussels to improve his French. It was thought that he would be following his father into the music business, but his mother, deciding that he was “food for powder and nothing more,” found him a position in an undemanding military school at Angers in France.

He was also indifferent to a military career but allowed his oldest brother, Richard, to arrange a low-ranking officer’s commission in the British army. His mother then used her own influence to have him selected as an aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and promotion to lieutenant in a regiment in Ireland near home.

Arthur’s regiment was sent to India when his brother was appointed Governor-General of India. He insisted that Arthur change his last name to the more respectable-sounding Wellesley–”Wesley” had an unfortunate association with Methodism.

At the time, British India was a very small part of the whole and the French looked to be assembling a strong position there. The princely state of Mysore under its sultan, Tippu, was a particular danger. Colonel Wellesley, as he now was, was given command of one of the columns sent to end the threat, but walked right into an ambush.

He did a little better north of Mysore in hunting down a Maratha warlord and, over a number of expeditions, learned his army trade, at one point beating a 40,000-strong French-trained Maratha force with 10,000 men.

He returned to England in 1805 and was appointed Chief Secretary of Ireland, with offices in Phoenix Park in Dublin.

In 1817, two years after Wellington defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, a monument was erected to him in the Phoenix Park. At 62.5 m, it is the second highest obelisk in the world (being exceeded only by the Washington Monument).

A bas-relief on the pedestal of the Wellington Monument in Dublin, dipicting a battle scene from the Duke’s India Campaign.

Massacre at Vellore

This incident was a consequence of underestimating the religious and cultural sensitivities of the sepoys, not always understood by British officers but ignored at their peril. In November 1805 the commander-in-chief of the Madras Army, Sir John Cradock, son of the Archbishop of Dublin, ordered a change in head-dress from turban to `round hat’, and the removal of beards, face-painting and joys’ (jewellery). Caste-marks ornaments and beards often had religious significance, and `round hats’ were regarded as synonymous with Christians in the eyes of the sepoys, so the new regulations were seen as an attack upon the troops’ religion.

Vellore, in Southern India, was garrisoned by three Madras battalions (1st/1 st, 2nd/lst and 2nd/23rd), and four companies of the 69th Foot. The Indian regiments rose on the night of 10 July 1806, massacred the 69th’s sick in their hospital, murdered officers and fired into the European barracks. By delaying to pillage the fort, they allowed the surviving British to congregate on the ramparts; and an officer who was outside the fort when the rising began went for help to the nearest military post, Arcot, the station of the l9th Light Dragoons and some Madras Native Cavalry, who were unaffected by the unrest. The l9th was commanded by Sir Rollo Gillespie, from County Down, one of the most capable and energetic officers in India, and he set out with a relief force within a quarter of an hour of the alarm being raised.

Gillespie dashed ahead with about twenty men, and arriving at Vellore found the surviving Europeans, about sixty men of the 69th, commanded by NCOs and two assistant surgeons, still clinging to the ramparts but out of ammunition. Unable to gain entry through the defended gate, Gillespie climbed the wall with the aid of a rope and a sergeant’s sash which was lowered to him; and to gain time led the 69th in a bayonet-charge along the ramparts. When the rest of the l9th arrived, Gillespie had them blow in the gates with their galloper guns, and made a second charge with the 69th to clear a space inside the gate to permit the cavalry to deploy. The l9th and Madras Cavalry then charged and slaughtered any sepoy who stood in their way. No mercy was shown. About 100 sepoys who had sought refuge in the palace were dragged out, placed against a wall and blasted with canister shot until all were dead. Such was the nature of combat in India where the ‘civilised’ conventions of European warfare did not apply.

Gillespie later joined the 8th Royal Irish Light Dragoons and saw service in Java and Sumatra before returning to India where he was shot dead while leading his men in a war against the Gurkhas.

The “Great Mutiny”

On 10 May 1857, British rule throughout India was shaken to its foundations when the native troops or sepoys at Meerut mutinied, and a day later they captured Delhi. The revolt quickly spread. Native regiment after native regiment turned on its British officers, and the outnumbered European forces (26,000 regular army, 14,000 East lndia Company) sought to contain an Indian strength of perhaps 300,000.

The roots of the revolt lay in the relentless process of modernisation which British rule in India had unleashed since the early nineteenth century. Sacred Hindu and Muslim customs and beliefs were being swept aside with scant ceremony, and the caste system in particular had come under attack. Added to this seething unrest at what British rule might ultimately mean was the growing fear that service in the company’s native regiments was a stepping stone to Christianity—a fear that some British officers conceded was wholly justified. Moreover, the blatant racism of British officers (though there were exceptions, such as General William Butler, from Bansha, Tipperary, who was sympathetic to the natives wherever he was stationed, though he spent only two years in India) towards their Indian colleagues, as well as the sepoys, and the widespread native perception that European forces were spread impossibly thinly throughout the country, helped set the scene. The Indian soldiers of the Bengal Army had been shaken by the reduction in the purchasing power of their pay since the beginning of the century to less than that of their offices’ private servants. Their houses were filthy, with sanitation non-existent. This all led to the furious sepoy reaction to the introduction of the new Lee-Enfield rifle in 1857 and its controversial greased cartridge (supposedly using grease from pigs). In the crisis that subsequently engulfed the “Raj” (an expression invented by the BBC around 1947!), Irishmen and Irish soldiers were to play a vital role.

The Great Mutiny—as the British called it—found a number of Irishmen in key positions. The three Lawrence brothers held high office in Rajputana (George), the Punjab (John) and, significantly in Lucknow where Henry was Chief Commissioner. Under him, the siege of the residency at Lucknow was embarked upon, an epic that caught the imagination of the Victorian public. With Henry besieged (and soon mortally wounded), John set about disarming and breaking up potentially mutinous native regiments in the Bengal army. He was also successful in drawing a number of Indian princes into an offensive alliance, and at the same time he was instrumental in supplying the small British force still holding out near Delhi. The Lawrences had been educated at Derry, and they were inspired not to yield to the attacking forces by folk memories of the seventeenth-century ‘Siege of Derry’. Henry’s dying instruction to the Lucknow garrison was “No surrender! Let every man die at his post, but never make terms!”

Similarly imbued with the seventeenth-century covenanting spirit was that remorseless foe of the rebels, John Nicholson, who on news of the rebellion formed a Movable Column from British and Punjabi irregulars. Moving with great speed, he wreaked havoc wherever he led them in the Punjab: one tactic which he soon adopted was the blowing away of mutineers from cannon mouths. Lieutenant Frederick Roberts (later Lord Roberts of Kandahar and Waterford, and Commander in Chief in India)—the famous ‘Bobs’—commented that Nicholson’s methods were “awe-inspiring certainly, but probably the most humane as being a sure and instantaneous mode of execution”. However that may be, “blowing rascals away from guns”, as the Ulster-born Colonel James Graham put it, was also designed to have a major deterrent effect in that it challenged the Hindu belief in reincarnation.

In the event, these spectacular mass executions were soon curtailed as being a waste of gunpowder: resort was soon had to the usual methods of wholesale hanging, bayoneting and shooting. There were other excesses, which may be passed over, but it should be noted that such tactics were employed by Lawrence and Nicholson (and other British commanders) from an early date, certainly before news broke of the massacres of British soldiers and civilians at Cawnpore. Nicholson was killed leading the main assault on Delhi: stern, implacable and fearless to the end, he was a Victorian hero. His Sikhs loved him: indeed a cult had grown up around him during his life, and several of his followers committed suicide on his death. Kipling in Kim pays homage to Nicholson’s memory when he has the old man sing “the song that men sing in the Punjab to this day: Ahi! Nikal Seyn is dead—he died before Delhi! Lances of the North take vengeance for Nikal Seyn.”

Right, Privates Ryan, from Kilkenny, and McManus, from Armagh, were awarded the VC for saving wounded at Lucknow.

Irish soldiers, both in Irish regiments (the 75th Foot, the 53rd Foot, the 60th Foot, the 101st Foot, the 86th Foot and especially the 88th Foot—the Connaught Rangers) and in the East India Company forces, were much involved in the various battles and storms (notably the relief of Lucknow, the attack upon Jhansi, and the assault on Delhi) that brought the rebellion to a bloody end.

At a critical time during the siege of Lucknow, when a relief force was said to be nearing the city, a tall Irish postal worker, Thomas Henry Kavanagh, volunteered to slip out of the Residency, make contact with the relief force and guide it back through the city to the compound. Kavanagh had gained a reputation for courage in the underground battles during the siege and his offer was accepted. Although over six feet tall and with red hair, he was disguised as a native. Kavanagh made his way past checkpoints, swam the river Gomti and made contact with the British army. He was awarded the Victoria Cross and acquired the nick-name “Lucknow” Kavanagh. The picture on the left shows Kavanagh (in dark jacket) with officers of the 1st Bengal Fusiliers, who had a long history in India. They later became the Munster Fusiliers.

Everywhere the fighting frenzy of the Irish and their lust for booty became the stuff of legends. At the sack of the fabulous Kaiserbagh Palace at Lucknow, W.H. Russell, the famous war correspondent, described how one of the Irish soldiers of the 53rd Foot, “drunk with plunder”, came at him through the smoke and flames.

“Look here! Look here!”, he cried, “Holy mother of Moses, what will you give me for this iligant shtring of imeralds and jewls” [sic].

Right, Sergeant Garvin, from Tipperary, who was awarded the VC at Delhi.

And while it is true that the assault on Delhi was led by Nicholson whose death in action brought him entry to the Victorian pantheon of heroes, the conduct of his fellow Irish among the other ranks also brought fame of another kind. G.O. Trevelyan, later a noted advocate of army reform, described one incident in graphic terms:

“The principal part in the capture of Delhi was played by a comic Irish sergeant who appeared to have emancipated himself from all discipline and – perhaps with unmerited distrust of the powers of the regulation rifle – went into action armed with a shillelagh. Among other feats, he danced the jig without hat or bonnet under the mid-day Indian sun – an act of daring which alone should have sufficed to procure him the Victoria Cross.”

“Bobs” Roberts

He was born in India, though his family came from Kilfeacle, County Tipperary. He joined the Bengal artillery in 1851 and fought with distinction in the Indian Mutiny (1857-58), earning the Victoria Cross. By 1875 he was quartermaster general of the Indian army and a strong advocate of the -forward- policy of controlling the Himalayan passes to forestall Russian encroachments; this became the general defensive policy of the British in India. He became a popular British hero for the relief of Kandahar in the second Afghan War (1878-80).

In remembrance of the War, a special “Kabul to Kandahar” medal was struck (later known as the Roberts Star). The Roberts Star was presented to all who had taken part on his march, and Queen Victoria even gave one to Roberts’ horse, Voronel, which also received the Afghan campaign medal with four clasps.

Roberts was made commander in chief of the Madras army in 1880 and of the entire Indian forces in 1885. In 1893 he came to England and wrote his reminiscences, Forty-one Years in India (1897). He became field marshal in 1895. In 1899, when the English were meeting reverses at the hands of the Boers in the South African War, Roberts was appointed commander in chief. Roberts reorganized the transport system, achieving a mobility that had been lacking. His son was killed trying to retrieve the guns in Colenso during the Boer War, shortly before Bobs took over as commander. By late 1900 the war seemed near a successful conclusion, and Roberts was brought home, awarded an earldom, and appointed commander in chief of the British army.

Along with Sir Henry Wilson (and of course most British Army officers) he was a vehement opposer of Home Rule for Ireland. He was asked to command the Ulster Volunteer Force to fight Home Rule, but felt he was too old, and proposed General Richardson, another Indian veteran, instead. He died of a chill caught visiting Indian troops in France in 1914.

Soldiers of the 1st Madras Regiment standing outside the gateway of the Chota Imambara, Lucknow, Summer 1858, which had been damaged in the fighting. Three of the four VCs awarded to the regiment during the recent fighting had been gained by Irishmen. This regiment later became the Dublin Fusiliers.

Charles Napier

The Napiers were a famous military family, one branch of which came to live in Oakley Park House, Celbridge, Co. Meath, in 1788. They had eight children and two of their sons, William and Charles, became world famous. They were first cousins of Lord Edward Fitzgerald from Carton House, Maynooth, who died a rebel in the United Irishmen Rising of 1798.

Charles Napier was a lieutenant in the army at the age of 13 years. He served with distinction in the Peninsular war but it was in the army in India that he was to achieve fame. He outraged his family by returning home from a long campaign in Greece with two daughters, born of an alliance with a Greek woman. Now in his sixties, he had made no secret of the fact that he had accepted command in India only to make enough money to see his daughters properly married. He was a superior strategist, always conquering with a minimum of British losses, and he also proved to be a remarkable pacifier, who brought a measure of good government to an area that had been periodically robbed by predatory hill tribes. Throughout the Sind he was known as “the Devil’s brother”. He was subsequently knighted and became Commander-in-Chief of the army of India, before returning home with his invalid wife.

Walter Hamilton, V.C.

Hamilton came from a well-known family from Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny. He was a great nephew of General Sir George Pollock who led the Army of Retribution in the First Afghan War. He arrived in India in 1874 and transferred to the Corps of Guides, one of the most famous and active Indian Army regiments. He won his VC at Futtehabad where he was obliged to assume command of two squadrons of Guides Cavalry following the death of Major Battye in a charge against 5000 Afghans who had streamed out of their defensive position behind breastworks at the top of a steep slope. Hamilton and his intensely loyal men were spurred on by a sense of revenge for their leader’s death and drove the ememy back to the breastworks and scattered them. In the fight, Hamilton rescued a sowar (Indian trooper) from three tribesmen.

The scene of Hamilton’s last stand was the Bala Hissar, an enclosure within the city of Kabul. He commanded a small force of 20 Cavalry and 50 Infantry, all from the Corps of Guides, which formed a discreet escort for Sir Louis Cavagnari the Envoy who was to set up the ill-fated residency in Kabul following the Treaty of Gandamak (Cavagnari, in the centre of the picture on right, was the son of an Italian aristocrat and an Irish mother). This treaty was made with the Amir, Yakub Khan who resided in his palace 250 yards from the British Residency.

On 3rd September 1879, one of the Amir’s Afghan regiments paraded without rifles to receive arrears of pay. When they realised that they were to receive half what they were expecting, they rioted and killed the Amir’s General, Daud Shah. Hamilton and Surgeon Ambrose Kelly, from Dublin, were having breakfast at the time but were rudely interrupted by the crowd who entered the residency throwing stones at the troops. The troops fired back, whereupon the rioters withdrew and stormed the arsenal to collect weapons.

The crowd attacked the barracks and managed to set it on fire. They had also managed to set up two field guns to attack the troops. One of the Afghans’ guns was positioned to blast a hole in the barracks where Hamilton and most of the Guides were. He led a brave attempt to capture the gun but had to fall back after killing the gun crew. Two other attempts involving Surgeon Kelly and the political officer, William Jenkyns, failed causing the deaths of both of them. Lt. Hamilton was the last officer remaining. He led another effort and managed to seize the gun but the other gun was in place. In a last ditch attempt, Hamilton shot and hacked his way through the rebels and placed himself between the gun and them where he finally succumbed to wounds and was cut to pieces. The remainder of his company were killed.

Although General Roberts did succeed in defeating Ayub in one more battle, the British had to admit that their time was up in Afghanistan. The various tribes still made it abundantly clear that as little as they liked each other, they liked the British still less. The North-West Frontier was still considered the wild frontier and caused headaches for British planners in India for a long time yet to come.

Massacre at Amritsar, 1919

Udham Singh was hanged in Britain in June 1940 for the murder of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the Lieutenant-Governor who presided over the British suppression of the 1919 uprising in Punjab. Udham Singh was an orphan raised at Khalsa Orpanage. O’Dwyer was of farming stock from Tipperary. His killing marked the end of a chain of events that began at 4:30 p.m. on April 13, 1919, when Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, himself born in India, opened fire on an unarmed gathering in Jallianwala Bagh. Udham Singh was a witness to that carnage, which became a turning point in Indian history, and he waited twenty years to carry out his act of vengeance.

As in Ireland, nationalism was on the rise in India at this time. The actual issue that served to rally millions of Indians, arousing them to a new level of disaffection from British rule, was the government of India’s hasty passage of the Rowlatt Acts early in 1919. These “black acts,” as they came to be called, were peacetime extensions of the wartime emergency measures passed in 1915, against the unanimous opposition of its Indian members. There was a succession of protests in the Punjab against the detainment of opposition politicians, leading to the death of a handful of British residents in Amritsar. When Brigadier General Dyer arrived, his fellow British residents had convinced themselves that the events of 1857 were about to repeat themselves. A protest meeting was arranged at Jallianwala Bagh. It was a Sunday, and many neighboring peasants had come to Amritsar to celebrate a Hindu festival, gathering in the Bagh, which was a place for holding cattle fairs and other festivities. Dyer arrived there, along with two young officers, Briggs and Anderson, 50 Indian and British rifle-men, 40 Gurkhas, and two armoured cars. A few minutes before sunset, the first of 1,650 rounds were fired into the crowd. No warning was given to disperse before Dyer opened fire, and the crowd of men, women and children had no way of escaping the Bagh, since the soldiers spanned the only exit. About 400 civilians were killed and some 1200 wounded. They were left without medical attention by Dyer, who hastily removed his troops to the camp.

Sir Michael O’Dwyer backed Dyer’s actions, as did many of the British establishment. Twenty years later he paid the price.

Mutiny by the Connaught Rangers

By 1920 a guerilla war had been waging in Ireland for several years against British rule, during which Britain sent irregular forces which carried out indiscriminate acts of violence against the civilian population. The 1st battallion of the Connaught Rangers had returned to India the previous year, after having seen action throughout the First World War. Astounded and disgusted by news of the brutalities being meted out to their friends and relatives at home, ‘C’ Company of the Rangers were so incensed that they refused point blank to carry out any more orders issued by anyone connected with the British Army. They were soon joined by others, and it became evident that their nickname ‘the Devil’s Own’ had another side to it. Stubbornness was allied to their known courage.

All efforts to talk the continually growing group of mutineers into giving up ‘their silly act’ only intensified their feelings. They held a meeting and it was left open to any man among them to join the mutineers or not. Only some twenty men decided to opt out and no hostility was shown to these. A committee was selected; the Union Jack at Jullundur, on the North West Frontier, was replaced by the Irish tricolour, stitched together by men who had bought lengths of material from the local bazaars. The four hundred men of the Rangers, their average age twenty-two, continued their mutiny. They mounted sentry and did all that was required to keep their own position intact. They continually repeated their reasons for the mutiny to their officers.

When terms of surrender were eventually reached, the Rangers were marched to ‘a new camp’ outside the cantonment on the plain. Here they were subjected to the greatest of inhumanities – threatened with death by a squad of fully-armed troops and only saved by the inter- vention of a priest. They were made to live under canvas, something no British troops were ever expected to do in the broiling heat of India.

The mutiny spread to Solan where other companies of the Rangers were stationed, and it was here that one man stepped forward and calling out his name and number identified himself as the leader. Two of the mutineers died at Solan while attacking the armoury. When eventually the mutiny was put down and the long months of terrible hardship endured, those words of Private James Daly were well remembered. He was one of fourteen men sentenced to death for their part in the mutiny; when the sentences were reviewed Daly’s was the only one left standing. T P Klfeather in his detailed book, The Connaught Rangers, begins his story at this point:

“It was ordered by Major-General Sir G. de S. Barrow, K.C.B., K.C.M.G. of northern command of the British Army in India, from his headquarters at Murree, that at six o’clock precisely on the morning of 2 November, Private James Joseph Daly, age 22 years, of the 1st battalion The Connaught Rangers, regimental number 35025, from Tyrrelspass, county Westmeath, Ireland, would be executed by a firing party at Dagshai prison.”

The final act of the drama that began on that hot day in June now moved inexorably towards its conclusion. Daly, from a family all of whom had served with the British army, would get no reprieve.

The picture on right shows a private in the Connaught Rangers, Punjab.

Let’s leave the last words on these soldiers to Emily Lawless, a poet and writer:

“War-dogs hungry and grey,
Gnawing a naked bone,
Fighters in every clime,
Every cause but their own.”

© Reform Movement

Ireland’s peculiar status under the Union is central to explaining its ambiguous involvement in the British Empire. The formal Union of the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain masked a hybrid administration with manifest colonial elements, allowing variant interpretations of the character of Ireland’s dependency within the Empire. Was Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom, a peripheral and backward sub-region, or a colony in all but name? These were the conflicting assumptions of unionists, devolutionists and separatists respectively. The manner in which the contending parties specified Ireland’s current status reflected, yet also restricted, their visions of its future condition. Underpinning these perceptions of the present and future were incompatible beliefs about the Irish past, reinforced and mobilized by historians and polemicists. Yet the sense of destiny associated with historical mythology, whether unionist or nationalist, was repeatedly challenged by external influences such as legislative reform and changing economic opportunities. Even unionists, pledged to defend the liberties conferred by the Glorious Revolution and incorporated in the Imperial Parliament, might contemplate rebellion against a ‘radical’ government should it tamper with the Empire. Even those who viewed Ireland as a vassal colony within the Empire might hope to benefit from employment in the Empire’s service. Thus changes in the practical operation of the Union were capable of transforming Imperialists into rebels, and separatists into colonists. This paper concentrates on the Irish as colonisers and Irish attitudes towards the Empire, leaving aside the vexed question of Ireland’s own status as a colony. In what ways did political conflict concerning Ireland’s future intersect with broader issues of Imperial development? How important were the Irish as colonists? And in what ways did Ireland and the Irish influence the Empire?

The broad question of colonial qualities in Irish thought and imagination, which has recently provoked vigorous if opaque debate among literary critics and ‘cultural theorists’, cannot be totally ignored in a study of Ireland and the Empire. Said’s specification of Ireland’s colonial status, which it shares with a host of non-European regions: cultural dependence and antagonism together’, is based upon a premiss incapable of historical verification. Said assumes that ‘Irish people can never be English any more than Cambodians or Algerians can be French’, finding confirmation in the record of Irish protest against British government.’ As I shall argue, the political expression of Irish attitudes towards the Empire was far more various and discordant than this allows. Ireland had its rebels, its ‘mediators’ and ‘collaborators’ or ‘shoneens’, its Imperialists, and its unselfconscious metropolitans. The battlegrounds of Anglo—Irish and intra-Irish conflict are littered with the ghoulish shards of incompatible images representing the Empire, and Ireland’s place within it.

For republicans and separatists, Ireland’s colonial subjection to a foreign force of occupation was an article of faith. Republicanism rested on the belief that the Irish nation had remained essentially intact through centuries of oppression, requiring only reawakening to cast off its veneer of Anglicization. Not only did republicans long for the destruction of the British Empire in war, but they also viewed Imperial conflicts as providing an opportunity for rebellion. The spirit of 1798 was reinvoked in 1916, despite powerful evidence that war had augmented the oppressor’s coercive capacity rather than weakening it. Just as the Fenians had prayed for war with America or Russia, so their successors saw Germany as a potential saviour. As Maeve Cavanagh wrote in ‘Ireland to Germany’:

I watch the red flame fiercer grow,
The tide of war, its ebb and flow,
And see the nations writhe and strain
I, who my freedom strive to gain,
The while I pray “swift fall the blow
That lays the tyrant England low”.²

Even nationalists hopeful of a constitutional settlement were inclined to relish the alternative path of Imperial collapse, as in the case of a Cork emigrant writing from Australia in 1887: ‘Myself and Pat often come to the conclusion that nothing will save Ireland but a home legislature or otherwise a war that will rake Ingland from one of her dominions to the other, May God send either of the two.’³ For a few Irish nationalists all of the time, and for many occasionally, the Union was tantamount to colonial annexation and the promise of freedom lay in its destruction. This interpretation shaped the behaviour not only of Irish rebels, but of many subsequent ‘anticolonial’ movements for which the Irish experience provided a ‘pathfinder’.

The manifest failure of successive rebellions and conspiracies between 1798 and 1916 fostered various less adventurous and more tactical programmes of nationalism. The movements for dual monarchy, repeal of the Act of Union, Home Rule, federation, and devolution all stopped short of demanding full separation, while deploring the economic, social, and moral consequences of the Union. One of the curiosities of Edwardian nationalism is Arthur Griffith’s pre-revolutionary Sinn Féin programme, with its demand for restoration of an idealized version of the Irish constitution of 1782, under a system of dual monarchy modelled on Hungary’s supposed autonomy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.⁵ Despite its formal adherence to monarchy, Griffith’s nationalism was bitterly anti-Imperialist in its assault upon the Anglicization of Irish culture. This qualification did not apply, in general, to the Repeal or Home Rule movements. Daniel O’Connell was a powerful advocate of the application of English liberties, enlightenment and culture to backward Ireland. Isaac Butt, founder of the Home Rule League in 1873, demanded metropolitan status for Ireland within a federation which would ‘consolidate the strength and maintain the integrity of the Empire’. The Irish, having ‘paid dearly enough’ for the acquisition of Imperial possessions since the Act of Union, were ‘entitled to our share in them’.⁶ In 1880 J. L. Finegan, Parnellite representative for Ennis, could refer in the same speech to ‘the present unjust and tyrannous system of government in Ireland’ and the ‘great and noble Empire’, to which Ireland had contributed so much blood and muscle. Parnell’s party included several members with close Indian links, who variously campaigned for fairer Irish representation in the Indian Civil Service or for self-government in both countries.⁷ Frank Hugh O’Donnell, whose brother Charles James became a Commissioner in the Indian civil service, regarded Irish nationalists as the ‘natural representatives and spokesmen of the unrepresented nationalities of the Empire’. He himself attended the Indian Constitutional Reform Association’s inaugural meeting at Tagore’s London house in 1883, and campaigned unavailingly for the nomination of Naoroji for an Irish constituency.⁸ Like many nationalists, O’Donnell viewed the struggle for Home Rule as part of the broader demand for devolution of power throughout the Empire.

John Redmond, nationalist leader between 1900 and 1918, looked forward to ‘a measure of legislative autonomy similar to that enjoyed by any of your self-governing Colonies or Dependencies. If you want an illustration look at Canada, look even to the Transvaal.’9 Redmond’s admiration for the forms of colonial self-government was perfectly consistent with his own and his party’s indignant denunciation of the war against the Boers, drawing upon what the police termed ‘a seditious and treasonable spirit towards England which, in its extent and intensity, has surprised many who believed they had the fullest knowledge of the people’. Recurrent Imperial wars reminded the Irish of their own history of coercion and annexation; yet in its more benign aspect, evolving towards a ‘Commonwealth’, the Empire seemed to many nationalists to offer the prospect of an acceptable condition of self-government sheltered by Britannia’s protective shield. The relevance to Ireland of the Canadian precedent was repeatedly affirmed by advocates of Home Rule, recurring in the Anglo—Irish agreement of 1921—22. Gladstone presented Home Rule as being ‘strictly and substantially analogous’ to Canada’s status in the Empire, a comparison vigorously denied by unionists.¹¹ Viscount Milner, when privately discussing the possibility of future unionist acceptance of some form of Home Rule, insisted that Ireland’s autonomy should be restricted to that of Québec within Canada rather than of Canada within the Empire12 In reality, the scope of the three Home Rule Bills fell far short of the Canadian settlement of 1867, and responsible government on colonial lines was never a serious option before the First World War.

If nationalist attitudes towards the Empire were diverse and responsive to changes in its organization, ‘loyalist’ opposition to any form of devolution became ever more uncompromising. Though the abolition of the Irish Parliament had been deplored by many Irish Protestants as subverting the Ascendancy and opening the way to Catholic Emancipation (belatedly enacted in 1829), the Union once established was promptly redescribed as the most effective bulwark against further unwelcome reforms. More significantly, adherence to the Union was widely perceived as offering commercial advantages to both capitalists and their employees, and as protecting the security of Protestant tenant farmers from predatory Catholic neighbours. For a large minority of the Irish people, liberty resided in the reinforcement of the Union rather than its dismemberment. Despite Joseph Chamberlain’s early support for a devolved Irish administration and the federalist dreams of many Tory grandees, it became extremely hazardous after 1886 for any Conservative politician or Irish Protestant to question in public the desirability of perpetual integration in the United Kingdom. The expedient alliance between Conservatism and ‘Ulster’ in the campaigns against Home Rule reinforced the conviction of Irish loyalists that they were metropolitans rather than fringe-dwellers, let alone colonial subjects.

Nor did most Irish Protestants accept the nationalist innuendo that they were mere ‘colonists’ or settlers, proud though they were of the doughtiness of their distant ancestors who had admittedly performed those roles.’³ Instead, they pictured themselves as full citizens and redoubtable defenders of the Empire. Like the Marquess of Salisbury, they believed that ‘to maintain the integrity of the Empire must undoubtedly be our first policy with respect to Ireland’: the survival of the Union and the Empire were inseparable.¹⁴ Though it has been claimed that the Imperial element in Ulster unionism was a fabrication of the Diamond Jubilee and the Boer War, its imprint was obvious from 1867 in the triennial meetings of the Imperial Grand Orange Council.¹⁵ Orangeism, the fraternity at the heart of Ulster unionism, provided a microcosm of Ulster’s Protestant diaspora through its interlocking networks of lodges in Ireland, Britain, north America, and Australasia. The ceremonious conferences of the Imperial Grand Orange Council symbolised the Ulsterman’s dual role as metropolitan and empire-builder.

Irish Protestantism produced several outstanding exponents of poetic imperialism, including the Munster clergyman Richard Sargint Sadleir Ross-Lewin. In a scruffy volume published in 1907, he affirmed ‘our’ metropolitan status:

But our little western island
Could never stand alone,
And we share in the greatest Empire
That the world has ever known.
To Celt and Scot and Saxon
That Empire was decreed,
Twas won by Irish soldiers
Of the grand old fighting breed.

Ross-Lewin had only contempt for ‘the Little England Pygmies’, who ‘left the empire making to men like Cecil Rhodes’, while idly watching ‘the Tottenham Hotspur wipe out some rival team’ — an arresting repudiation of the games ethic as a foundation of imperialism.’⁶ The Irish Imperial vision

Erin’s moon would shine afar
O’er west’ring seas to distant lands
Where fair Columbia folds her hands.

Coyle’s ‘Homeland’ was ‘these British Isles’, for which ‘England’ was the most suitable equivalent term (‘for poetic purposes’). Like J. R. Seeley’s, his vision transcended the formal possessions: ‘The term ‘The Empire” . . . is used to connote all the English-speaking nations, and thus we include the United States, which, although having an independent and different form of government is really one with us in race, in language, in religion, and in laws.”⁷ For Irish unionists, belonging to the Empire signified attachment to English civilization, not subjection to an external authority.

Irish responses to the Empire were modified through the nineteenth century by changing perceptions of its character and likely future evolution. The possibility of movement towards a devolved Commonwealth made many nationalists optimistic that membership might eventually be reconcilable with freedom. Yet the recurrence of punitive wars against subject peoples simultaneously reinforced the separatist conviction that the Empire was intrinsically oppressive. For unionists, the extension of the Imperial quest from strategic domination to cultural proselytism gave even greater force to their sense of being metropolitan participants. Interpretations of Ireland’s status, whether metropolitan or colonial, were also influenced by the practical consequences of Imperial legislation for various sectors of the Irish population. Altered perceptions of the relative benefits and costs of continued attachment were reflected in seeming inconsistencies of rhetoric, whether on the part of ex-Fenians becoming Home Rulers or devolutionists becoming intransigent unionists. Irish thinking about the Empire thus mirrored the broader complexities and uncertainties of the Anglo—Irish connection.

¹⁸ Prominent among these were James McNeill from Antrim, a Commissioner in the Bombay Presidency until 1914 and subsequently Governor-General of the Irish Free State; and Sir Michael O’Dwyer from Tipperary, who as Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab after 1913 secured half a million recruits for the wartime forces. O’Dwyer had two brothers in the Society of Jesus, while McNeilI’s brother Eoin was the titular Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers who attempted to abort the Easter Rising in 1916.’19 Irish candidates were less successful in penetrating the Sudanese political service after 1899, and shrill complaints of discrimination by the Provost of Trinity ‘only confirmed’ the administrators ‘in the wisdom of preferring Oxford and Cambridge’.²⁰ At a lower level of administration, Irish Catholic emigrants became prominent in the public service in both Australia and Canada. In 1867, the Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald claimed credit for that achievement in Canada: ‘What Irish Catholic ever held office above the rank of a Tide Waiter or Messenger, until I did them justice.’²’ Among senior colonial administrators, however, Catholics failed to disturb the dominance of Protestant Englishmen, Scots, and Irishmen.

The armed services provided a still more important Imperial outlet for Irishmen of all religions and classes. For Irish as for Scottish university graduates, openings in the Indian army offered them ‘a stake in defending national, that is to say British, interests’.²² Protestant Ireland was over-represented among officers in the Bengal army between 1758 and 1834,23 as also in the British army. Census returns indicate that in 1851 Irishmen accounted for over a quarter of all regular army officers born in the British Isles, a proportion falling to a seventh by 1901 but usually exceeding the Irish component of the population at large. Military commissions provided employment for members of most families of Irish gentry, the pool of officers remaining virtually closed to the middle classes and to Catholics until the First World War. The feats of Irish generals and heroes provided the basis for numerous affirmations of racial superiority in war. As Ross Lewin boasted:

Nor shall we now relinquish the prize of field and flood,
Our share in glorious Empire won by our fathers’ blood.
Nor lack we still of heroes with Saxons to compete
While Roberts rules our Armies, and Beresford our fleet.²⁴

Both Roberts and Beresford chose Irish as well as colonial designations when accepting peerages; but in other cases, Irish birth was incidental or even embarrassing to the heroes of Britain’s colonial wars. Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl of Khartoum and of Broome in Kent, may have been born near Ballylongford in Co. Kerry; yet he cared as little for his nativity as had the Duke of Wellington. As Birrell observed, ‘Lord Kitchener was not a real Irishman, only an accidental one’.²⁵ Only occasionally did Irishness intrude upon military professionalism, as in the case of Sir William Francis Butler, son of a Tipperary landowner and Commander-in-Chief in South Africa on the eve of the Boer War. Butler was a Catholic Home Ruler, whose sympathy (according to Milner) was ‘wholly with the other side’.²⁶ In general, Ireland’s military heroes were drawn from a stock equally alien to ordinary nationalists and unionists, and the Irish deeds that won the Empire were those of a caste rather than a people.

Natives of Ireland were slightly over-represented among ‘other ranks’ in the regular army, though notably deficient in the Royal Navy, the Royal Marines, and the merchant service.²⁷ Irishmen were only just outnumbered by Britons among soldiers enlisted in the Bengal army between 1825 and 1850.²⁸ After the official admission of Catholics to the British army in 1799, natives of Ireland quickly became a sizable component, reaching about two-fifths in 1830 and 1840, but falling to a quarter by 1872 and less than a tenth by 1911. This decline was mainly attributable to Ireland’s rapidly diminishing share of the United Kingdom’s population.²⁹ Though more than 150,000 men were raised in Ireland between 1865 and 1913, the Irish Command invariably provided less than its expected share of recruits; but this deficiency was outweighed by heavy enlistment of Irish emigrants in Britain.³⁰ The prominence of Irish servicemen in Imperial wars, particularly in South Africa, could produce strange juxtapositions, as at Ladysmith where two brothers from Co. Longford apparently lost their lives, one fighting for Blake’s Irish Brigade and the other for the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.³¹ It could also lead to the bitterness expressed in a letter sent home to Newry by a private in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers: ‘I was reading in the papers where the Irish people were subscribing for the Boers, and are backing them up; but the Irish people will want to be careful of themselves, or we will do the same with them as we are doing with the Boers.’³² In addition to service in the Imperial forces, Catl\olics (mainly of Irish descent) were well represented in colonial units such as the Australian Commonwealth Horse in South Africa.³³ Nationality did not effectively discourage unemployed Irishmen, mostly Catholics, from volunteering to fight the Empire’s wars.

The most far-reaching contribution of the Irish to the development of the Empire was through emigration. Although most Irish emigrants made for the United States or Britain, there were nearly 300,000 natives of Ireland living in Canada in 1861 and close to a quarter of a million in the Australian colonies by 1891. As a proportion of the entire overseas-born population, the Irish were as prominent in Australasia and Canada as in the United States itself. In about 1870, for example, a third of immigrants in the United States were Irish, a slightly smaller proportion than in Canada. In Australia the Irish component exceeded a quarter, compared with less than a fifth in New Zealand. Even in the quieter period between 1876 and 1914, Canada and Australia each attracted over 90,000 emigrants from Irish ports. In the course of the century Irish emigrants scattered throughout the Empire. Census returns testify that in 1911 there were about 14,600 Irish natives in the Union of South Africa, 12,200 in the Indian Empire, 1,000 in the Maltese islands, 400 in Ceylon, 250 in the Straits Settlements, and 160 in the Federated Malay States. In almost every Imperial possession, Irish colonists had become a significant element of the settler population.

Irish emigration to the more distant colonies was facilitated by state subventions, without which the much cheaper British or American options would have seemed irresistible. About half of all emigrants from the United Kingdom to the Australian colonies up to 1900, and the large majority of Irish settlers, received some public assistance. For the 160,000 convicts transported there between 1788 and 1867, of whom over a quarter were Irish-born, settlement at public expense was involuntary though not always unwelcome — during the Great Famine, the impulse to escape Ireland was sufficient to induce paupers to smash a window or steal a handkerchief in the hope of being sentenced to transportation. The system of convict labour was surprisingly efficient in satisfying colonial demand for domestic and outdoor service during the first half of the nineteenth century, compensating for Australia’s lack of slaves.³⁴ Voluntary emigration was encouraged by a variety of schemes, mostly funded from colonial land revenues with supplementary contributions from the emigrants or from private sponsors already in the colonies. Nearly a quarter of a million Irish settlers were assisted to Australia between 1836 and 1919 (a third of the total from the British Isles), and 30,000 were shipped to Vogel’s New Zealand during the 1870s. The most lavish scheme involved the removal to Australia of 4,000 female ‘orphans’ from Irish workhouses between 1848 and 1850, outfit and passage to Plymouth being provided by the Boards of Guardians while the full cost of shipping was paid from colonial funds. Most subsequent assistance was contingent on the nomination of emigrants by colonial sponsors, creating a form of subsidized chain migration which the Irish exploited far more methodically than did the English, Welsh or Scots.

Irish movement to Canada and sometimes southern Africa was accelerated by the promise of land grants, though seldom by direct payment of transportation costs. Despite recurrent demands for systematic colonization of Canadian or other wastelands by the ‘surplus’ population of rural Ireland, the vast cost of Peter Robinson’s pilot scheme of 1823—25 discouraged further experiments. With support from Wilmot Horton in the Colonial Office, Robinson had shipped 2,300 people in family groups from a dozen densely populated and restive Munster estates to Upper Canada (Ontario), at a cost of no less than £20 per ^capita. Subsequent official assistance to north America was largely restricted to supplements, worth about £5, which enabled some 45,000 paupers to leave Ireland (mostly for Canada) between 1849 and 1906. Local Boards of Guardians again provided outfit and transportation within the British Isles for paupers whose passages had been funded by previous settlers. The bulk of Irish emigrants to Canada received no official subsidy, many proceeding to the United States after taking cut-price passages to Québec or New Brunswick. This applied particularly in 1847, when nearly 100,000 passengers, many already emaciated and feverish, were shipped to Québec from Irish ports and Liverpool (often at the expense of their landlords). About a sixth of them died aboard or shortly after arrival, prompting understandable Irish aversion to vessels bound for Canada, and eventually generating more rigorous regulation of passenger shipping. The reduced flow from post-Famine Ireland to Canada was once again dominated by Ulster Protestants, already a tight-knit and powerful element of rural society in Ontario. Whereas state subsidies and therefore quality controls shaped Irish colonization of the more distant dominions, the drift to Canada was fitful and mainly governed by private decisions.

Despite colonial objections to the shovelling out and dumping of Irish paupers and papists, often at colonial expense, only Ireland proved capable of supplying the required blend of agricultural workers and domestic I servants. Ireland’s greatest comparative advantage as a source of colonists was the absence of any effective restraint upon female emigration. The dearth of non-agricultural employment in Ireland pushed out men and women with roughly equal force, while the Famine emergency had overwhelmed parental resistance to exposing young girls to the moral and physical perils of transoceanic travel. Whereas men vastly outnumbered women in British emigration, the sexes were evenly balanced in movement from Ireland after the 1840s. Though young unmarried women were usually offered preferential assistance to the woman-starved Australasian colonies, the official agencies had great difficulty in enticing English or Scottish girls with the prospect of domestic service and marriage in rude colonial surroundings. Only the lrish fulfilled Wakefield’s requirement for a successful colonization: ‘an equal emigration of the sexes’.³⁵ By about 1870, Australia (like Britain and probably the United States) had an almost equal number of Irish-born men and women. Whereas the majority of Irish emigrants to Canada were Protestants, the proportion was less than a quarter in Australia despite energetic official attempts to encourage settlement by Ulster Protestants. New Zealand had a larger component of northern Protestants, exemplified by the Tyrone Orangemen and their families who colonized Kati-Kati or ‘New Ulster’ in 1875, under the leadership of George Vesey Stewart. Initially concentrated in the menial sectors of service and labour, Irish settlers in Australasia and Canada rapidly colonized a broad range of occupations such as farming, mining, shopkeeping, policing, and the civil service. By contrast with the American Irish, they showed no marked propensity to cluster in urban enclaves or indeed to settle in cities.³⁶ As ‘human capital’, Irish voluntary colonists proved no less sound an investment than their convict brethren.

Irish colonization of the Empire had the further effect of stimulating a substantial reverse migration. Admittedly, only about 8,000 natives of the British possessions and the Indian Empire (in roughly equal numbers) were enumerated in the Irish census for 1901. Yet between 1895 and 1913, some 18,400 Irish nationals ‘immigrated’ to the United Kingdom from British North America, 11,300 from Australasia. and 14,900 from British South Africa.³⁷ Though some of these were doubtless tourists or business travellers rather than returning emigrants, their colonial experience brought the realities of the Empire closer to many Irish homes. Their presence reinforced the already extensive coverage of Imperial affairs and conditions of life in the Irish provincial press, popular novels, and (above all) personal letters from emigrant friends and relatives.³⁸ Migration in both directions, mainly voluntary and often undertaken with enthusiasm, gradually entangled the Irish with all the nationalities of the Empire. If most of Ireland eventually wriggled out of the Imperial embrace, many of its people did not.

Ireland’s influence on the Empire cannot be precisely assessed, since the impact of particular Irish men and women was only partly and dubiously attributable to their ethnicity. Journalistic attempts to chronicle the achievements and ‘contribution’ of the expatriate Irish were commonplace in the later nineteenth century, serving to defend Irish and often Catholic prestige against British and colonial sniping.³⁹ In addition₁, there were many Imperial echoes or imitations of Irish models, which profoundly influenced colonial legislation in fields which cannot be discussed today, such as education and land tenure. Ireland’s importance as a colonial model was enhanced by its own ambiguous status as a ‘colonial’ element within the United Kingdom, which generated many exportable experiments in social and political control. Moreover, Irish techniques of resistance to British authority were occasionally appropriated by colonial nationalist movements. Though to some extent reciprocal, the balance of trade in colonial structures and techniques was overwhelmingly favourable to Ireland.

Colonial administrators were besotted with the Irish Constabulary, an armed force under semi-military discipline but civilian control which occupied ‘barracks’ throughout Ireland (outside Dublin). The successful management by mainly Protestant officers of 12,000 ‘native’ constables of humble origin, mostly Catholics, heartened Imperialists everywhere. In order to restrict fraternisation and entanglement with local interests, constables were regularly relocated and marriages discouraged. Initially a paramilitary force alienated from a lawless population, the Irish Constabulary gradually secured a more comfortable social niche, despite the intimidating effect of its uniforms and weaponry. It remained responsible for the suppression of occasional riots and rebellions, sometimes in combination with military detachments acting ‘in aid of the civil power’. It used to be generally accepted that the Irish Constabulary was the model for almost all colonial police forces, during what Jeffries termed the ‘second phase’ of militarisation (following initial improvisation and preceding the creation of civilian forces). Jeffries identified direct Irish influences in the nomenclature, training and paramilitary functions of forces ranging from Ceylon and India to the West Indies and Palestine. After 1907, all cadets for colonial forces were trained at the Irish depôt in Phoenix Park, Dublin. These influences were reinforced by the numerous former officers and members of the Irish Constabulary who became colonial policemen, and also by the legion of Irish-inspired Indian officers who helped establish forces elsewhere.⁴⁰ Though Jeffries confined his account of the ‘Irish model’ to the policing of colonies with large native populations, other studies have detected Irish influence in the centralised forces serving the Australasian and Canadian colonies41 Despite recent demonstrations that the diversity of colonial policing defies reduction to a single model, that the London Metropolitan Police was also imitated, and that many aspects of Irish practice were ignored, the strength of Irish influence in Imperial policing remains incontestable.⁴² The Irish case had shown the Empire that a relatively small and dispersed armed force could subdue a large and recalcitrant population over a long period.

The broader political consequences of Irish colonization, expressed through the actions and attitudes of countless settlers and their descendants, defy easy encapsulation. To many British and Protestant colonists, Irish Catholics seemed a potentially subversive and disloyal underclass, always inclined to reapply their Irish grievances to colonial agitation. Such apprehensions were strongest among Ulster Protestant settlers, who used the international fraternal network of the Loyal Orange Institution to proclaim their own loyalty and defend the colonies against papist aggression. In South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, the Orange lodges were rapidly assimilated into conservative politics, the sons of Ulster soon being outnumbered by local activists exploiting the efficiency and popular appeal of Ireland’s most sophisticated fraternity. Among the leading Orangemen of New South Wales in the 1870s, for example, less than a third were natives of Ireland.⁴³ The Canadian Orange Institution was particularly influential in conservatism, drawing prestige from its prominent role in resisting the feeble Fenian ‘invasions’ of Canada in 1870 and 1871. Irish emigrants were also active in the development of colonial Freemasonry, forming networks of lodges with warrants from the Grand Lodge of Ireland rather than England or Scotland. The ‘loyal institutions’ provided a superb vehicle for Irish Protestant settlers sloughing off the unwanted connotations of ‘Paddy’ and ‘Mick’, stereotypes applied indiscriminately to Irish emigrants of all origins.

Irish fraternal expertise was also exhibited by Catholic emigrants, who protected their collective economic and social interests through friendly societies such as the 1-libernian Benefit Associations in Australasia, and the related Ancient Order of [libernians in north America. Though not primarily political in function, the Hibernian divisions helped mobilise lay Catholics as a social and potentially a political force. Irish nationalist organisations supporting Repeal and Home Rule received essential moral and financial support from equivalent colonial networks, drawing upon Australian Catholics as well as Irish emigrants. Yet colonial support for Fenianism and other movements favouring ‘physical force’ was minuscule, by comparison with response in the United States. The former Young Irelander Thomas D’Arcy McGee, three years before his assassination in Ottawa in 1868, described Fenianism as ‘the worst obstacle, the Devil has ever invented for the Irish, anirreligious revolutionary society in which patriotism takes the garb of indifferentism, or hostility to religion’.⁴⁴ In Sydney, the demented Irishman who almost murdered the Duke of Edinburgh in March 1868 evidently acted without accomplices, despite the ingenious attempts of Conservative politicians to fabricate an Irish-Australian conspiracy.⁴⁵ The ‘Catholic’ (otherwise ‘Irish’) vote became a major factor in mainstream colonial politics, being generally aligned as in Britain with parties favouring liberal reform, and subsequently with parties representing the interests of trades unions. Labor Party candidates in prewar New South Wales were disproportionately successful in constituencies with large Catholic components, although Catholics did not predominate in the federal Labor Party until the 1930s.46 Careful to avoid challenging the legitimacy of the Imperial affiliation, Irish colonists and their Catholic descendants nevertheless made a distinctive contribution to the terms of democratic debate.

The Imperial influence of Irish institutions extended to the churches, which provided a surplus of highly trained spiritual managers for deployment throughout the Empire. This was most evident in the proliferation of Catholic priests ordained in Ireland, and in the rapid colonial extension of Irish-based religious orders providing educational and medical services. Irish Catholicism, though thoroughly ‘Romanized’ by the 1850s, was often at loggerheads with the established networks of French or English priests who had typically initiated diocesan organisation in the colonies. Though Irish emigrants were at first their ceniral concern, the army of Irish priests and nuns rapidly extended their ministrations to the conversion of aboriginal peoples, the reclamation of godless colonials, and the care of Catholic emigrants from Britain and Europe as well as Ireland. Often ignored in studies of missionary expansion, the Catholic clerical diaspora was scarcely distingishable in its aims and ideology from its Protestant counterpart.47 In every colony, the Catholic church worked assiduously to overcome its baneful Irish reputation and to affirm its Imperial patriotism. Though never ceasing to bemoan past Irish wrongs, the Irish-trained clergy conveyed little hint of alienation from British rule when indulgently applied through the mediation of representative government.

Colonial Protestantism also had unmistakably Irish elements, though these were easily assimilated with the dominant English and Scottish strains. Trinity College, Dublin, was a major source of Anglican missionaries in India and elsewhere, producing doctors who could hold their ‘own at tennis with the best in Bengal’. One such muscular Irish Christian would enlighten the heathen by ‘getting the patients to squat down on the ground at the daily dispensary, and giving them a fifteen or twenty minutes’ talk before the medicine was dispensed’.⁴⁸ Irish Protestants were also prominent in the Canadian and Australasian clergy, whether Anglican, Methodist, or Presbyterian. Among Presbyterian ministers recruited in the various eastern Australian colonies between 1823 and 1900, the Irish-born proportion ranged between a ninth and a quarter.⁴⁹ The imprint of Ireland may thus be detected in virtually every colonial institution, ranging from schools and police forces to land law, fraternities, political parties, and the churches. Likewise, the imprint of Britain may be found in every Irish institution, signifying the ambiguity of Ireland’s location in the Empire. Through the exercise of imagination, the nineteenth-century Irish might elect to play the parts of colonials (whether deferential or resentful), metropolitans, or colonizers. To be ‘Irish’ was, among other things, to face that unsettling choice.

^References

1 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), pp. 266, 275.

2 Copy, with music by Cathal Mac Dubhghaill, in NLI, Ir 780p23^.

3 Phil Mahoney (Footscray, Victoria) to Lar Shanaha. 1887 David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish Migration to Australia (Ithaca, N.Y., and Cork, 1995), p. 264.:

4 MacDonagh, Ireland P. 95.n Lurrig Co. Cork), 18 Aug

5 [Arthur Griffith], The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland Dublin 1904 concerning the Ausgleichof 1867.

6 H. V. Brasted ‘Irish Nationalism and the British Empire in the late nineteenth century’, in MacDonagh and Mandle, Ireland and Irish-Australia pp. 85—86.

7 Alan O’Day, The English Face of Irish Nationalism: Parnellite Involvement in l3nitish Politics. 1880—86(Dublin, 1977), pp. 161—65.

8 Mary Cumpston, ‘Some Early Indian Nationalists and their Allies in the British Parliament, 1851—1906’,English Historical Review LXXVI, no. 299 (1961), pp. 281—85.

9 O’Brien, Dublin Castle pp. 420—21.

10 lnspector-General, RIC. Monthly Confidential Report for October 1899, in NAI.

11 Ward, Irish Constitutional Tradition pp. 62—63, 79—84.

12 Mjlner to Balfour, 17 April 1910, in John Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom Constitution. 1870-1921 (Kingston, Ontario, 1988), P. 112.

13 The tag ‘settler (unionist) population’ recurs in Gretchen M. MacMillan, State. Society and Authority in Ireland (Dublin, 1993), p. 147.

l4 L. P. Curtis, Jr., Coercion and Conciliation in Ireland. 1880—1892: A Study in Conservative Unionism(Princeton, 1963), pp. 59, 355.

15 Alvin Jackson, ‘Irish Unionists and Empire, 1880-1920’, in Jeffery, An Irish Empire? p. 135.

16 Poems by a County of Clare West Briton (Limerick, 1907), pp. 8, 86—87. Ross-Lewin called upon the loafers to forgo football and ‘attend at rifle practice, like men of martial mien’. Ross-Lewin echoed (or perhaps anticipated) Kipling’s contemptuous reference in ‘The Islanders’ (1902) to ‘the flanneled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs in the goals’: Mansergh, Commonwealth Experience I, p. 154.

17 Dr.Edward Coyle, The Empire: A Poem (London and Belfast, 1905), pp. 10,5—6; W. J. Reader, At Duty’s Call: A Study in Obsolete Patriotism (Manchester, 1988), pp. 46—47.

18 Scott B. Cook, ‘The Irish Raj: Social Origins and Careers of Irishmen in the Indian Civil Service, 1855—1914’, Journal of Social History XX, no. 3 (1987), pp. 507—29; R. B. McDowell and D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin. 1592—1952: An Academic History (Cambridge, 1982), p.53⁸ (n. 38).

19 T. G. Fraser, ‘Ireland and India’, in Jeffery, An Irish Empire? pp. 88—89; Sir Michael O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It. 1885-1925 (London, 1925), pp. 1—15.

20 J. A. Mang~, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (London, 1986), pp. 83, 205 (n. 33).

21 MacDonald to J. G. Moylan, 4 July 1867, in Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, MG/29/D15.

22 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism p. 330.

23 P. E. Razzell, ‘Social Origins of Officers in the Indian and British Home Army, 1758-1962’, British Journal of Sociology XIV, no. 3 (1963), p. 250. Although Ireland provided only a fifth of officers compared with nearly a third of the population of the United Kingdom in 1831, some three-quarters of the Irish population were Catholics and therefore disqualified from Indian commissions.

24 RossLewin, Poems p. 29.

25 Augustine Birrell, Things Past Redress (London, 1937), p. 218.

26 Springhall, “‘Up Guards and at Them!”’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the Military(Manchester, 1992), p. 64.

27 Census returns giving the birthplaces of men in the various services were tabulated between 1851 and 1921.

28 Bayly, Imperial Meridian. p. 127.

29 Peter Karsten, ‘Irish Soldiers in the British Army, 1792—1922: Suborned or Subordinate?’, Journal of Social History XVII, no. 1 (1983), pp. 31—64; I-I. I. Hanham, ‘Religion and Nationality in the Mid-Victorian Army’, in M. R. D. Foot, ed., War and Society (London, 1973), pp. 57-69.

30 David Fitzpatrick, ‘”A Peculiar Tramping People”: The Irish in Britain, 1801—70’, in Vaughan, New Historyp. 641; Fitzpatrick, ‘”A Curious Middle Place”: ‘The Irish in Britain, 1871—1921’, in Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley, eds., The Irish in Britain. l845—193~ (London, 1989), p. 23.

31 RIG, Crime Special Branch, file 21831S (carton 16), in NAI. Irish army casualties during the Boer War amounted to 133 officers and 2,961 men, about a tenth of the total: Donal P. McCracken, The Irish Pro—Boers. l877—1902 (Johannesburg and Capetown, 1989), pp. 123 24.

32 Ibid., p. 126.

33 About a fifth of those enlisted were Catholics, only marginally less than the Catholic component of the population: W. N. Chamberlain, ‘The Characteristics of Australia’s Boer War Volunteers’, Historical Studies(Melbourne), XX, no. 78 (1982), pp. 48-52.

34 Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge, 1988).

35 Fitzpatrick, ‘Emigration, 1801—70’, in Vaughan, New History. p. 573.

36 See Donald Harman Akenson,The Irish Diaspora: A Primer (Toronto and Belfast, 1993); Fitzpatrick, Irish Emigration. 1801—1921 (Dublin, 1984).

37 Board of Trade, annual Statistics and Tables of Emigration and Immigration in House of Commons Papers, passim.

38 See Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation’ Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters (Toronto and Belfast, 1990), pt. 3.

39 Francis Hogan, The Irish in Australia (Melbourne and Sydney, 1888); Nicholas Flood Davin, The Irishman in Canada (London and Toronto, 1877).

40 Sir Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Police (London, 1952). For Indian echoes of the Irish Constabulary in Sind (1843), Bombay (1847), Madras (1855), Oudh (1858), and the entire subcontinent (1861), see CookImperial Affinities pp. 31—32.

41 David M. Anderson and David Killingray, eds., Policing the Empire: Government. Authority and Control. 1830-1940 (Manchester, 1991), pp. 3, 39, 56—57.

42 Richard Hawkins, ‘The “Irish Model” for the Empire: A Case for Reassessment’, in ibid., p p. 18-32; editors’ introduction, pp. 3—4.

43 Mark Lyons, ‘Aspects of Sectarianism in New South Wales, circa 1865 to 1880’ (Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 1972), pp. 423-30. Eleven of the thirty-six leaders with stated birthplace were Irishmen, including two from Munster. For comparable Canadian findings, see Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto, 1980), pp. 91—95.

44 McGee to J. G. Moylan, 27 Oct. 1865, in Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, MG/29/D15.

45 Phillip M. Cowburn, ‘The Attempted Assassination of the Duke of Edinburgh, 1868’, Royal Australian Historical Society Journal LV, no. 1(1969), pp. 19—42.

46 Celia Hamilton, ‘Irish Catholics of New South Wales and the Labor Party, 1890-1910’, Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand VIII, no. 31(1958), p. 265; Declan O’Connell and John Warhurst, ‘Church and Class’, Saothar VIII (1982), p. 49.

47 As in the Protestant case, the Catholic missionary impulse should not, however, be reduced to a crude mimicry of Imperialism: cf. Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag:

Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester, 1990).

48 K. W. S. Kennedy, Fifty Years in Chota Nagpur: An Account of the Dublin University Mission (Dublin, 1939), pp.4⁰-⁴¹. Dr J. G. F. Hearn was ordered home in 1911, dying in the following year.

49 Malcolm D. Prentis, The Scots in Australia (Sydney, 1983), p. 136.

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Reform Movement 2004

 

The Challenge Of The Irish Volunteers of World War II

Geoffrey Roberts

In Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition, Thomas Hennessey argued that the First World War posed a series of acute challenges to the Irish and Britannic identities that co-existed within Ireland on the eve of 1914. The interaction and development of these identities in the circumstances created by the war resulted in a transformation of the Irish Question. Ireland was divided psychologically before it was partitioned politically, says Hennessey, and the particular way in which identities changed and clashed during the war resulted in a separatist rather than a home rule Ireland.

World War II also posed a series of challenges to Irish identities. The different responses to this challenge in Ireland did not result in any great crisis nor any great rupture comparable to that of the First World War. But there was a definite outcome to the identity questions and issues posed by the war – an outcome that had an important bearing on the postwar development of the Irish state, politics and society. At the same time the diversity of responses to the identity question produced a series of political and cultural contradictions and tensions which are still evident 60 years later.

The particular theme of this article is the impact on that process of identity formation of the large number of Irish citizens who volunteered for service in the British armed forces between 1939-1945. During the war an estimated 70,000 citizens of neutral Ireland served in the British armed forces, together with 50,000 or so from Northern Ireland. Virtually all who served were volunteers and, unlike the First World War, Irish volunteering during the Second World War was not primarily a process of collective mobilisation. In southern Ireland, at least, decisions to volunteer and serve were mainly individual. No doubt individual decisions were influenced by family and friends and sometimes the process of enlistment was aided and abetted by various organisations, but there is no sign of the “logic of collective sacrifice” evident in Irish recruitment to the British armed forces during World War I. Nor was there any general political mobilisation for war even remotely comparable to what happened in Ireland in 1914-1918. In that light the figure of 120,000 recruits North and South, if at all accurate, compares well with the estimated 210,000 Irish volunteers during the First World War.

The idea that the Second World War was a crucial period of Irish identity formation is not new. In his treatment of the war period Terence Brown cited Clifford Geertz’s distinction between “essentialism” and “epochalism” in the process of national identity formation and nation-building. “Essentialism” refers to the utilisation of local traditions and symbols in the construction of new identities (in the Irish case various aspects of the Catholic and Gaelic tradition), while the concept of “epochalism” concerns the public political narrative of the nation-state’s relationship to the outside world. Brown argues that for the first 20 years of independent Ireland’s existence essentialism predominated in the process of identity formation but that from World War II onwards epochalism came much more to the fore.

What was the emergent “epochal” narrative of the Irish state during the war? De Valera in his wartime speeches told a story of a small state trying to survive and maintain its independence in a dangerous world dominated by big powers, a small state which stood for certain principles of international behaviour and for national rights, including the right to remain neutral. Notwithstanding the occasional gesture in the allied direction, de Valera’s public stance on the war combined strict political neutrality with a moral distancing of Ireland from both sides of the conflict. The only time he deviated from this position was in May 1940 when he expressed opposition to the German invasion of the Low Countries: it “would be unworthy of this small nation if…I did not utter our protest against the cruel wrong which has been done to them.”

De Valera’s statement coincided with the publication of Pope Pius XII’s expressions of sympathy for the plight of Belgium and Holland. But, much like Pius, de Valera was to maintain his silence thereafter. As Joseph Walshe, the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, told the German minister in Dublin, the speech was a mistake which would not be repeated. And it wasn’t. Not until long after the war did de Valera acknowledge the virtue and justice of the allied cause.

There were some challenges to de Valera’s nationalistic neutralist narrative – above all by James Dillon, until 1942 deputy leader of Fine Gael . Dillon argued that there was a great struggle against evil unfolding in the world, a struggle which Ireland should be part of. But de Valera’s viewpoint was the one accepted by Fine Gael and the rest of the Irish political elite. Moreover, the policy of neutrality and the definition and identity of the state that it embodied was a consensus attitude and policy at the popular as well as the elite level. These populist underpinnings of the evolving identity of the Irish state were themselves the product of a political strategy by the Fianna Fail government to neutralise public opinion on the war. The main mechanism for the implementation of this strategy was the censorship regime imposed during the war. As Donal O Drisceoil has shown censorship was more than just an instrument for safeguarding the formal-legal neutral position of the state it was also a form of propaganda whose aim was to foster a neutral public outlook on the war i.e. the view that there were no moral grounds on which to take sides in the war and that Irish neutrality was a morally superior stance to that of any and all the combatants.

Fianna Fail’s political manipulation of the censorship regime was but one aspect of its domination of the domestic politics of Emergency Ireland. Another salient aspect of Fianna Fail’s hegemony was its success in establishing the centrality of its definition of the nature of Irishness and of identifying the national interest with its own party interests. More generally, John. M. Regan has recently summarised the position thus: “Ireland’s experience of war helped foster a new consensus within Irish nationalist politics after the travails of the civil war (1922-3) and the internecine politics of the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the war “should be properly seen a catalyst accelerating the restoration of an older consensus within nationalism rather than a new beginning”. In December 1940 the Irish correspondent of The Round Table reported on the unifying effects of the national mobilisation to protect Eire’s neutrality: “Men who fought on opposite sides in the Civil War are now drilling and working together. British veterans of 1914 are serving in the local security forces side by side with men who fought against the British.”

Another aspect of this wartime consensus was highlighted by James Hogan in his book Election and Representation, published in 1945: Fine Gael’s strong support for neutrality amounted de facto to an abandonment of its distinct identity as the “commonwealth party. During the war Fine Gael made numerous reaffirmations of its support for Irish participation in the Commonwealth, but, as Hogan pointed out, standing aside when the very existence of the Commonwealth was at stake was tantamount to its abandonment. In this connection it cannot be without significance that it was a Fine Gael-led coalition government that took Ireland out of the Commonwealth and established the Republic in 1948.

But while Fianna Fail conceptions dominated definitions of Irish identity they did not monopolise them. As Alvin Jackson notes in his recent history of modern Ireland: “while most Irish people endorsed neutrality, there was broad sympathy for the allied cause; massive recruitment to the British army was compatible with popular support for De Valera”. Others have pointed to the significance of the fact that between 1939 and 1945 nearly 200,000 workers from Eire migrated to work in the British war economy – most of whom remained in the country after the war.

In relation to the issue of neutrality versus Ireland’s participation in the war Brian Girvin quotes Fine Gael leader Richard Mulcahy’s summary judgement in July 1940:

“Dev would have to swerve his party away from their present road. He could only get half. Cosgrave two thirds. We would be left with a divided front. One third of the country opposed to us. This would be a matter of terrible difficulty. The one third of the country would be that part with the greatest possible capacity for nuisance and damage.”

Mulcahy’s pessimism about the possibly dire consequences of a break with neutrality explains why in mid-1940 the Fine Gael leadership began to distance itself from talk of Ireland aligning itself with Britain. The exception among Fine Gael leaders was James Dillon who continued to emphasise the moral issue of the war and the prospects for a transformation of political attitudes in Ireland, particularly after the American entry into the war in December 1941. This point is endorsed by Girvin, who also emphasises the potential political capital of the British offer in July 1940 to end partition in return for Irish support in the war.

Girvin and Jackson’s questioning of the extent and solidity of the pro-neutrality consensus is confirmed by the evidence of a series of wartime British political intelligence reports on “The General Situation in Eire” . A major theme of these remarkably even-handed bimonthly reports is the impact of the course of the war on Irish public opinion. The summary for March-April 1942 reported:

“During March sources throughout Eire reported a troubled feeling on account of disasters and losses suffered by the allies…In spite of anti-British opinions aired in public, the overwhelming majority of the people are clearly pro-British at heart in the present struggle.”

On the other hand, “opinion continues to harden in favour of neutrality”. Commenting on the 1943 election campaign, the report of 1 July 1943 noted:

“The successful prosecution of the war and the money flowing into the pockets of the working class families from England has produced a wave of pro-British feeling throughout the country, thus neutralising the efforts of most of the Fianna Fail candidates to increase their polls by speeches calculated to stimulate the old nationalist and anti-British issues.”

The summary of 1 November 1943 noted:

“It has been aptly said that Eire’s neutrality is her own private war. It satisfies her spirit of defiance and independence and she is determined to show that she can win. It seems that Eire will abandon neutrality only if she becomes involved in a quarrel of her own with the Axis powers. A responsible official of the Department of External Affairs was recently asked whether Eire would abandon her neutrality if the Pope were persecuted or taken prisoner. He replied quite seriously: Who knows? That is the only question which might set things moving. (underlining in the original)

The American equivalent of the these British intelligence reports, produced by the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS), are less upbeat about pro-British and pro-allied feeling but still contain plenty of evidence of the fluidity and cross-currents of Irish identity formation during war. In January 1943 the OSS reported:

“All the parties are genuinely committed to the policy of Eire’s neutrality, and in so doing reflect quite accurately the sentiments of the vast majority of the population…[but] despite the existence of very rigorous news, movie and radio censorship, which prevents the population…from having any real understanding of the true nature of Nazi-ism and Fascism, it can be said quite truthfully that the sympathies of the vast majority of the people are on the side of the Allies. This is especially true since America’s entry into the war, and the turning of the tide of battle in favour of the Allies.”

Another source of evidence on Irish attitudes during the war are the articles, reports and stories of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. One of Bowen’s concerns was the impact of Irish isolation and neutrality on popular attitudes, including those of the pro-allied element in Ireland. In 1941 she wrote:

It is true that a thinking minority in Eire holds that the country would, in her own interests, have done better to enter the war, on the British side, in the autumn of 1939. This reflective opinion, quietly held, is distinct from the emotional opinion of former Unionists, with their tradition of service under the British flag. But this minority recognizes its own extreme smallness. It also holds that Eire, having declared for neutrality, is at this stage in no position to alter her policy. So this minority has to be ruled out; it does not now hope or wish to effect a change.

Later in the same piece she laments the impact of the Irish censorship regime:

But the general effect is – the sense of a ban on feeling, in a country in which feeling naturally runs high. And, more serious, there is an inhibition of judgement that cannot be good for human development. No fact (with regard to Europe) is withheld, but facts are denied moral context…On the whole, Eire’s sequestration from Europe is (for her) the principal ill of her neutrality: it may go to create a national childishness, a lack of grasp on the general scheme of the world

One group that escaped Bowen’s censure were those Irish citizens who enlisted in the British armed forces during the war. But what did this enlistment mean in Irish identity terms?

One angle is suggested by Terence Brown who argued that the war and Irish neutrality led to a further alienation of the so-called “Anglo-Irish” community in Ireland who felt that Eire should have fought alongside Britain. This suggestion may be linked to the idea that the Irish volunteers came predominantly from the surviving protestant-cum-unionist community in the Irish Free State. This was certainly the view favoured by Northern Ireland politicians just after the war. In a speech in October 1946 Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister Sir Basil Brooke said: “I have heard it said in a boasting manner that Eire men went forward to the war. Of course they did, but they were our men, they were our people who thought as we did”. The context of Brooke’s remark was the embarrassing fact that recruitment rates in neutral Ireland had been almost as great at those in “loyalist” Northern Ireland.

It is probably true that proportionate to their numbers protestants were over-represented among the southern Irish volunteers in British armed forces. Of the 100 or so Irish veterans of World War II interviewed/questioned by The Volunteers Project about 20% identified themselves as coming from a Church of Ireland background. But joining up was only one response of members of the protestant community to the outbreak of war. Another, not uncommon, response was for individuals to use the opportunity of the Emergency to integrate themselves into the broader community by supporting neutrality and by taking part in the local defence forces and other home front activities.

But most of the southern Irish volunteers were Catholic and together with their protestant compatriots they were representative of the social, political and religious diversity of Irish society. The volunteers reasons for joining up were as varied and diverse as one would expect from any cohort of young people: adventure, employment, money, family tradition, a sense of patriotic duty. Explicit political motives for volunteering – anti-fascism, for example – did not figure prominently in most cases but it seems clear that the volunteers were not unsympathetic to the cause they were fighting and that they did not share the hostility to Britain and the Brits of some of their compatriots. As to Irish neutrality, most volunteers supported it and saw no contradiction between their service for the allied cause and other patriotic obligations. The defeat of Hitler was seen as no less in Ireland’s interest than in Britain’s. As Denis Johnston, who served as a BBC war correspondent, noted in his diary in April 1942: “it is my belief in Ireland’s neutrality that has so largely sent me forth. Only those who are prepared to go into this horrible thing themselves have the right to say that Ireland must stay out.

In retrospect one can see the volunteers as symbolising and personifying a patriotic Irish nationalism which permitted a multiplicity of allegiances and loyalties – to Ireland, Britain, the allied cause – and as indicating the continuing possibility of combining of elements of Irish and British identities.

Contemporary echoes of this retrospective reading of Irish volunteer identity can also be found. The prime example is R.M. Smyllie, editor of the Irish Times during the war. Smyllie was the first to put forward the pragmatic defence of Irish wartime neutrality that figures so predominantly in the historical literature today. Smyllie argued that for various political reasons neutrality was a necessary policy, but it was one that suited the allies as much as Ireland. He pointed to the various forms of Irish aid to the allied cause, above all to the many thousands of volunteers in the armed services. Smyllie’s message was that Ireland was de facto on the side of the allies – “Unneutral neutral Eire” was the title of an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1946 – and that the Irish volunteers acted on behalf of the best interests of Ireland. Implicit in his arguments, too, was a much more diverse and cosmopolitan concept of Irish identity and of Ireland’s place in the world than that being propounded officially at the time.

Another contemporary example of a lauding of the volunteers role is an editorial by Peadar O’Donnell in The Bell in 1947. This was an editorial replying to Russian objections to Irish membership of the UN on the grounds that Eire had aided the Nazi cause. O’Donnell argued:

It would startle even the best informed among ourselves to have accurate figures of the recruitment of Irish men and women into the British armed forces and war industry…soldiers home on leave were welcomed by their neighbours. An air raid in Britain brought anxiety to every parish in Southern Ireland. One met the joke often…that what the Irish were doing dare not be told because the facts would embarrass both the Belfast Government who wished the world to believe their people were in the war, and Mr de Valera who wanted the Southern Irish to believe they were out of it.

The Irish state and government itself maintained an official silence on the question of the volunteers. During the war it could hardly do otherwise within the confines of the rigid public policy of neutrality and of the severe censorship regime which strove to maintain a balance between the allied and axis causes. But even after the war this official silence continued. One reason for this continuing official silence was undoubtedly the hostility to the volunteers in some republican quarters, including Fianna Fail. Another reason was that official recognition of the role of the volunteers would have put the policy of neutrality under critical scrutiny, including the fact that “unofficially” the Irish state had co-operated with the British state in numerous ways. No doubt, too, such recognition would have provoked considerable resentment among those who loyally served in the Irish armed forces and LDF.

Perhaps most important, the volunteers lacked a champion in the Irish political context. The only real possibility was Fine Gael, and many individual members and TDs did speak out on behalf of the volunteers after the war, for example, James Dillon. But officially Fine Gael tended to be as silent as Fianna Fail.

But these local political difficulties aside, there were perhaps some more profound reasons for the complete exclusion of the volunteers from mainstream discourse about Ireland’s role in the war.

First, there was the impact of the war on Ireland’s southern protestant community. The war was a watershed in the further diminution of a distinct and separate protestant identity in independent Ireland. As Kurt Bowen notes “it was not until after World War II that the well-entrenched communal boundaries of the [protestant] minority began to crumble”. This postwar development was the culmination of the long-term historical trends detailed in Bowen’s book, but the war definitely acted as an accelerant. The integration of many Irish protestants into military and civil defence structures has already been noted. Those protestants who left Ireland to fight in the war by and large never returned. And, as Elizabeth Bowen noted, the wartime isolation of neutrality had a corrosive effect on the loyalty and identity of the so-called West Brits. The combined effect was the further fragmentation of the social-cultural group most likely to be supportive of the volunteers in postwar Ireland.

The second fundamental problem of the volunteers was that their actions did not fit into the epochal narrative of Ireland then being constructed. They represented an alternative moral stance to the official neutrality of the war period. While the Irish state had distanced itself from the allied crusade against fascism and retreated into isolationism, the volunteers had – at least symbolically – embraced the anti-fascist cause. It was a deeply embarrassing tension given the democratic values that the Irish state itself proclaimed.

In the postwar period Irish politicians often used the excuse of partition for Eire’s non-participation in the war. But the truth was that neutrality reinforced partition and accentuated the polarisation of identities in Ireland. In this respect Dublin’s rejection of the British offer of July 1940 was an historic turning point in North-South relations. As Dennis Kennedy argued:

After de Valera’s rejection of the overtures of 1940, Ulster’s loyalty became of crucial importance to the British war effort. In early June 1940 the Unionist position was more vulnerable than at any time since 1921. Had de Valera taken up the British offer and agreed to some measures of joint defence of the two islands, then the Northerners would have come under irresistible pressure. But the danger to Unionist Ulster was only as real as the chances of de Valera abandoning neutrality…

In effect the war years, and Irish neutrality, were a confirmation of the complete gap that had opened up in Ireland between North and South. They were also, in Unionist eyes at least, proof that…Irish nationalism…was somehow inherently anti-British, that the new Irish identity consisted in a large part in rejection of a British identity and therefore in rejection of Northern Unionists.”

Irish citizens who had served in the British armed forces during the war, often alongside their Northern Irish compatriots, implicitly resisted and refused this polarisation. In Northern Ireland their diverse identity as Irish-British patriots was denied while in the south they were marginalised socially, politically and culturally, and excluded them from the ongoing process of identity formation. One example of this exclusion was the boycott by successive postwar governments of Remembrance Sunday commemorations. That began to change in the 1980s but official representation at remembrance services and ceremonies was patchy until the mid-1990s. Symbolically, the National War Memorial at Islandbridge was allowed to decay into a state of considerable disrepair. As well as official apathy there was popular hostility towards the volunteers which was summed up by the furore created by Gay Byrne’s announcement in 1988 that he would wear a remembrance poppy on his show. He backed down in the face of protests and threats.

But the problem of the place of the volunteers in Ireland’s epochal narrative remained, particularly as republican-nationalist dismissals of them came to have less and less purchase in public and political opinion. One obvious solution was to revise the narrative itself, to argue that Ireland wasn’t really neutral at all during the war, that it was a non-belligerent on the side of the allies, that the country did as much as it could to aid the allied side during the war. Within that framework the volunteers could be lauded as heroes who made a significant contribution to the allied cause, a not to be forgotten Irish dimension of the anti-fascist struggle during the Second World War. This revised narrative of the role of Ireland and the Irish in the Second World War came in the 1980s and 1990s to form the backbone of most historical works on the topic. In press coverage of anniversaries of the war, articles and editorials defending Irish neutrality stood side by side with features on the exploits of Irish volunteers. It is a viewpoint exemplified, by among others, Kevin Myers – a staunch defender of Irish wartime neutrality, but one who spent many years campaigning for public and official recognition of the Irish veterans of World War II. In November 1999 Myers wrote:

Ireland now officially remembers its lost sons of the Great War without embarrassment or shame. It would be no bad thing if people also freely recalled the purely personal and voluntary sacrifice made by many individuals, unsupported by any political campaign and rigorously concealed by the censor – even in their deaths – those whose fight for freedom helped to give us a free Europe.

But Myers underestimated the extent to which the Irish volunteers of World War II had already been fully rehabilitated – politically, historically, and in popular opinion. The contemporary consensus which views both the volunteers and wartime neutrality in a positive light is, of course, largely an updated version of R.M. Smyllie’s position, basically an attempt to harmonise the Irish neutralist position during the war with support for the allied cause.

Officially, the long government silence on the volunteers began to be broken in 1994 when Bertie Ahern (then Minister of Finance) formally opened the renovated and completed Islandbridge war memorial. Kevin Myers commented that Ahern’s presence signified “a change in attitude towards Irishness, in definitions of what it is to be Irish and how many forms of Irishness there can be without betrayal of anybody or anything.”

In April 1995 Taoiseach John Bruton spoke at Islandbridge and paid tribute to the 150,000 Irish people North and South who “volunteered to fight against Nazi tyranny in Europe, at least 10,000 of whom were killed while serving in British uniforms…In recalling their bravery, we are recalling a shared experience of Irish and British people…We remember a British part of the inheritance of all who live in Ireland.”

Bruton’s speech was interesting because of its implication that there is more to the issue of the volunteers than simply assimilating their role as an aspect of neutral Ireland’s contribution to the allied cause. His words were uttered in the context of the unfolding peace process in Ulster, and in front of representatives from Northern and Southern Irish political parties. His allusion to a shared Irish and British experience and to the British inheritance were an obvious gesture in the direction of a concept of Irish identity or identities incorporating a plurality of loyalties, experiences and traditions.

From being a marginal and excluded group in Irish society in the 1940s the Irish volunteers of World War II had by the 1990s come to represent historically and symbolically an aspect of a refashioned and broader concept of Irish identity. There is a certain poetic justice in all this since the most frequently reported volunteer experience of loyal service in the British armed forces was that it made them feel more Irish and more patriotic. Notwithstanding this strengthening of their Irish identity most volunteers did not feel very welcome when they returned to postwar Ireland, nor for many more years to come.

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Reform Movement 2004

“IRELAND IS NOT A NATION,
BUT TWO PEOPLES SEPARATED
BY A DEEPER GULF THAN THAT
DIVIDING IRELAND
FROM GREAT BRITAIN”

Walter Alison Phillips

Introduction

Unionism in County Donegal has a long and proud tradition and heritage, which dates back to the very foundations of the Unionist cause on this island. Yet it was during the period 1919-22 that the Unionist people of County Donegal were put to their utmost test. Ultimately, it is arguable that they lost – Ulster was partitioned and the pro-union community decimated. But in the final analysis it cannot be denied that Unionism in the county survived the period, and continued in one form or another up until the present day.

In this essay I hope to begin by giving a brief account of the events which led to the split with the UUC in early 1920, and the ramifications which this had on the political consciousness of loyalists in Donegal. I then propose to examine the decline in Protestantism, as well as the geographical concentrations of Unionists in the county, with special reference to the report of the Irish Boundary Commission in 1925. I will then attempt to trace the polarisation of the communities in the county, before moving on to accounts of sectarian violence during the “war of independence” period. In particular I hope to examine the unionist response to such violence, as well as the response to the attempted imposition of Dublin institutions on the county, and the effects both had on the most popular unionist institution, the Orange Order. As an example of inter-community conflict in the county I hope to examine in detail the tale of the border village of Pettigo from 1921-22.

This is the fascinating story of one community’s fight for survival during the War of Independence period.

“Ulster shall fight, and ulster shall be right”

Donegal was to the fore in the original campaign of resistance to the proposed imposition of Home Rule upon the people of Ulster. Stewart recalls that “from Belfast to the shores of Donegal, recruiting was going on at a rate which exceeded the most sanguine expectations”. A British intelligence report comments that “there is a very bitter feeling against Home Rule amongst the great majority of the Protestants in this county”.

The loyalist people of Donegal even organised a plan to ship in their own arms – from the beginning of 1913 Lord Leitrim of Carrigart, the OC of Donegal UVF, organised a scheme whereby arms would be purchased in Birmingham before being shipped to Donegal in his steamer the SS Ganiamore. By 1914 it was estimated that there were 128 rifles and 12,800 rounds of ammunition in the hands of the UVF in the county. Indeed Donegal’s UVF grew to be bigger than that of either Monaghan’s or Cavan’s, with 10 Unionist clubs holding regular drilling exercises. The Ulster Women’s Union met in Lifford to organise housing for the wounded out of any campaign of resistance. On the declaration of war in 1914, Donegal’s UVF was amalgamated into the 36^th (Ulster) Division as the 109^th brigade, sharing this honour with UVF regiments from Tyrone, Londonderry and Fermanagh – indicative of the close links Donegal had always enjoyed with her three neighbouring Ulster counties.

In the light of these links, it is hardly surprising that the underlying theme of Donegal Unionism from 1919/22 is one of betrayal. The major political question at the time was that of Partition. Owing largely to the success of Unionism and the UVF in gaining publicity for Ulster’s cause, it was generally accepted that Partition was inevitable. The crucial question became that of the boundary – options ranged from a 4 county to a 9 county Northern Ireland state. It was eventually settled that Londonderry, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Antrim, Down and Armagh would constitute the new Northern Ireland. This, of course, meant the abandonment of the loyalist communities in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan.

“Men not prone to emotion shed tears”

Thus it was that a crucial political drama was acted out within the Ulster Unionist Council during the months of April and May of 1920; a drama which split the Unionist cause in two, and which resulted in the breaking of Ulster’s Solemn League and Covenant of 1912. Recognising that they were about to be “sold down the river” the combined Ulster Unionist Council for the Three Counties organised themselves to face their brethren. They prepared a pamphlet opining that

“the facts about the Three Counties were as clear as when the Covenant was first signed, and they have not altered”

This pamphlet went on to point out that, even within a 9 county Ulster Protestants would have a solid majority of 200,064 and concluded optimistically that they were

“Thankful to see such a large number of the delegates from the Six Counties respect the Covenant they had signed, and are confident that they represent a large majority of the Unionists of Ulster”.

Unfortunately for the Donegal Unionists, their arguments held little sway with a 6 county community concerned that

“Protestants in the three counties are willing to swamp 820,370 Protestants merely for the satisfaction of knowing they are all going down to disaster in the same boat”

Thus, despite two meetings, and the resignations of many six-county members, such as Brig-Gen Ricardo of Sion Mills, in sympathy with the 3 county unionists, the Combined UCC of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal was forced effectively to resign from the UCC after being decisively outvoted by 301 votes to 80. This prompted the response from the popular Cavan leader Lord Farnham that “our members look upon themselves as betrayed and deserted”, leading the later unionist commentator, MacManaway to comment that “the Ulster people gave a bitter consent” to Partition. Even following the Great Betrayal 6 county unionists continued however to support at a grassroots level their 3 county brethren. The Rector of Newtownbutler, speaking at the Fermanagh County Twelfth celebrations in 1920 asserted that

“there was an element of cowardice and want of backbone in the action of the UUC in sacrificing the loyal men of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal … for which there was no argument whatsoever except the numerical argument”

“Cast aside without one single sign of recollection or recognition”

Needless to say this whole episode gave rise to very grave feelings of betrayal amongst the loyalist community in Donegal. John M. Barkley, a Presbyterian minister recalls visiting a friend’s house:

“There on the mantelpiece in the study was a framed copy of the Ulster Covenant. It had been torn in two and written across it were the words “The Broken Covenant”… It had been written in the minister’s own blood… the betrayal was never forgotten and I saw with my own eyes the anguish of one of those who had been betrayed”

Edward Carson MP signing the Solemn Covenant in 1912

This feeling of betrayal resonated throughout the community, and in one form or another exists to the present day. Relations between Unionists in Donegal and Londonderry were somewhat soured, although unionists in the latter county were horrified by the persecution of their Donegal brethren in early 1922, with many angry Londonderry Sentineleditorials and news reports demanding action. That said, Donegal Unionists still continued to look, albeit with a tinge of bitterness, to Belfast rather than Dublin – a fact which manifested itself perhaps most openly in the banner depicting Sir Edward Carson which was carried by Newtowncunningham LOL to the Donegal CL celebrations on July 12^th 1921.

“They have stood by the Empire – will the Empire desert them now?”

Thus it was that the Unionist community in Donegal was left to face the war of independence without the direct help of the apparatus of the soon-to-be established Northern Ireland state. There can be little doubt that the Protestant community suffered numerically as a result of the conflict as can be seen from the following table:

	Protestants	Roman Catholics	Total Population
Change in Towns 1911-26	-34.6%	+7.4%	-2.8%
Change in Rural Areas 1911-26	-21.4%	-6.8	-9.9%

Across the rest of what was to become Southern Ireland Protestant figures were decimated, largely due to the war of independence. Barkley claims that, by 1922, Presbyterian congregations were reduced by:

Athlone	30%
Connaught	36%
Cork	45%
Dublin	16%
Munster	44%

In general, of the Protestant congregations, Presbyterians suffered badly. In 1913 their Assembly voted democratically against Home Rule, by 921 votes to 43., and therefore, in nationalist eyes, they were seen quite definitely as being in the“enemy camp”. Class envy was also a factor, although in Donegal there was no major class difference between Protestant and Catholic farmers, with the exception of the Protestant gentry.

Geographically, Donegal Unionists were concentrated towards the east of the county. A 1913 British Intelligence report drew an “imaginary line” between Dunkineely in the South West to Moville in the North East – east of this line was where Unionists were strongest, although they did have other strongholds; most notably around Hom Head, Carrigart and Kilmacrennan.

Thus we can see that the Unionist community was largely split in two – between East and South Donegal. However there were differences between the two communities; Joan Vincent identifies the Eastern community as having the three characteristic indices of Scottish settlement: Scottish surnames, Presbyterianism and the Ulster-Scots dialect. Indeed she identifies the area immediately west of Londonderry, “the Laggan”, as being a “core” Ulster-Scots area. In contrast the South Donegal Protestants didn’t have these characteristics.

The strength of Unionism in certain areas of Donegal can best be seen in the recommendations of the Boundary Commission in 1925, which urged the transfer of the “Laggan” area west of Londonderry (an area exclusive of the unionist enclave of Raphoe) to Northern Ireland. The Donegal Protestant Registration Association claimed that

“the Unionist inhabitants of [Donegal] desired that it should be included in Northern Ireland, and that the economic difficulties occasioned by the boundary would thereby be removed”

The DPRA had a point, as the following table shows:

Areas of County Donegal…	Catholic	Non-Catholic
Within 5 miles of Londonderry	754	1160
Within 10 miles of Londonderry	5427	5180

The Boundary commission also recommended the inclusion of the tiny Unionist enclaves of West Urney, Grousehall and large portions of Pettigo and Templecairn. However other Unionist areas around Ballyshannon and Letterkenny were left in the Free State. The report of the Boundary Commission is useful in examining the geographical placement of Donegal Unionists during the war of independence, even though it’s findings were never implemented.

“This county cannot now be regarded as adequately policed…”

Throughout the period 1919-21 the underlying theme with regard to County Donegal is one of decline. Slowly but surely the RIC, although backed by the military, failed to contain the growing wave of SFIRA terrorism. By October of 1920 the police were forced to withdraw from the nationalist stronghold of West Donegal, prompting the gloomy comment in the monthly police report that

“the county cannot now be regarded as adequately policed or protected and is in a distinctly unsatisfactory state”

Towards the East of the county things were in a slightly better situation, due both to the high level of support amongst the community for the police, and also to the increasingly stable situation in the county and city of Londonderry, where, by the end of 1920 the police commented:

“the UVF is now thoroughly organised for the protection of life and property… and willing to assist the police in case of necessity”

Despite the fact that, at this time, the revived Donegal UVF still maintained a strength of 1993 volunteers, there are no records of similar UVF assistance for the police, although known UVF sympathisers were likely to get off lightly for possession of rifles or ammunition.

The polarisation of the two communities can be traced perhaps most accurately through the pages of the local nationalist newspaper, the Donegal Democrat. By early 1920 the nationalist community found any outward display of Britishness or British culture to be distasteful. Referring to popular British dances the Democrat asserted that:

“Our criticism went a considerable distance in banishing from the town and neighbourhood those demoralising dances more adapted for the slums of [the] English…”

Even harmless Ultonian institutions came in for attack; by March 1920 an editorial condemned the Ulster Farmers Union, and by August Irish Farmers Union advertisements replaced those of the UFU in the Democrat. “Foreign” games were also looked on with distrust and the paper was scathing in it’s criticism of the Gaelic-Irish speaking village of Townawilly for playing “soccer football”.

From such harmless expressions of sectarianism more sinister actions developed. By November of 1920 the monthly internal police summary reported that:

“The outrages consisted chiefly of intimidation by threatening letters, raids on mails, raids for arms, cutting telegraph wires and raids for the purposes of theft”

Roads were blocked, railways destroyed. The post was regularly suspended. All this led to the Londonderry Sentinelexpressing the hope that the wave of terror instigated by the IRA would

“revive amongst the thinking section of the Donegal people consideration of the question whether the county has lost or gained by having thrown itself head and heels into the arms of Sinn Fein”

In June of 1921 the Democrat records an IRA raid on a farmer William Thompson and is wife in the predominantly Unionist area of Raphoe. In May of that year the Presbyterian Lecture Hall at Quigley’s Point was burned down, whilst on April 25^th a pamphlet produced by pro-union activists on the mainland recorded that:

“Meenglas Protestant Church, County Donegal, desecrated by Sinn Feiners. Communion Table used for meals. Wine drunk. Prayer books, Bibles and surplices torn up and font defiled”

On the same day the house of the postmaster in the same village was attacked, all his money stolen and his life threatened. On the 15^th of September Unionists in Raphoe were warned to withdraw their custom from the Ulster Bank in the town.

Donegal Unionists were therefore despised for their culture, attacked for their religion and deprived of their democratic rights. Despite these attacks however, the community proved resilient; the Orange Order in particular continued to host well-attended loyal events, particularly the Twelfth celebrations each year.

“…But few of our brave men were lost, so stoutly we defended…”

There is some evidence that the Unionist community participated in these incidents of sectarianism. A police report for October 1920 records that an AOH hall was burnt down in the village of Pettigo. Shots were also fired at two local Sinn Fein / IRA activists by unionists rumoured to be playing a “drunken prank”. In October of 1920 letters were posted up right across Donegal urging people to inform on IRA terrorists. These letters provided detailed instructions on how to inform anonymously, and were roundly condemned by the nationalist Democrat as evidence of grassroots unionist activity in the county.

Particularly in the east of the county the RIC were able to continue with near normal governance, with the Democratrecording numerous occasions on which petty sessions were held, although this was usually with heavy military backing. For instance, on July 12^th 1920 the Irish Times records that:

“For the opening of the Donegal Assizes the military have erected sandbags and machine guns at Lifford courthouse”

Perhaps nowhere however can the grassroots sectarian conflict be seen better than in the saga of the little unionist border village of Pettigo, half of which lay in County Donegal, and half in County Fermanagh. This situation was remarked upon by a correspondent of the Irish Independent who opined humourously that the situation would provide a good basis for an Irish comedy. Unfortunately a far more serious drama was to be played out in the village during the period from 1921 to 1922.

Neville McElderry, a local historian, recalls that

“The Pettigo area of County Donegal had been predominantly Protestant and Unionist, but as tension mounted and a considerable amount of harassment occurred on both sides, many Protestants moved into Fermanagh”

In the face of growing IRA activity over the rest of County Donegal, the loyalists of the village soon asked the British government for help. Firstly B-Specials were sent, and then A-Specials to protect the Fermanagh half of the village. The IRA responded and “caused much consternation by setting up a barracks in Mill Street” They also forced loyalists to paint out a mural upon which were inscribed the words “Fear God, Honour the King”, whilst other IRA men “looted extensively”.

By May of 1922 such persecution provoked the Londonderry Sentinel to devote an entire editorial to the situation. Asserting that “the whole district has been put in a reign of terror” the paper pointed out that the persecution of Donegal unionists had increased to the point where many were being forced to seek refuge across the border in Londonderry.

By June 3^rd of 1922 the Sentinel was reporting that “a considerable number of refugees have arrived at Castlederg”. Also on this day however British forces moved down a nearby lake and landed in the IRA occupied Belleek-Pettigo triangle, followed by another column which advanced on Pettigo from the east. The troops proceeded, despite heavy IRA fire, to liberate the village, capturing terrorist weapons and men, as well as a stolen police car. By June 8^th the Sentinel trumpeted in a headline “Pettigo Loyalists Rejoicing!” as the townspeople welcomed their liberators. The owner of the house where the mural was obliterated paraded around the town wrapped in the Union flag, whilst children played at wearing stolen IRA caps – “binding them round with red, white and blue ribbons”

After two years of relative subjection, and several months of downright oppression, the unionist community in the area eagerly grasped the excuse for celebration. As the Sentinel reports:

“Over every farmhouse a Union Jack was stretched in the breeze”

The contemporary historian Walter Alison Phillips concluded that

 

“the affair had a wholesome effect, if only as showing that the British Government was not indefinitely malleable”

The Pettigo incident did indeed have a wider significance, as it discouraged other border IRA units to make similar forays into what was now Northern Ireland territory.

“The partition of Ireland is an accomplished fact”

However, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the experience of Donegal Unionism is the often stormy relationship which existed between the emerging illegal government of Dail Eireann and the minority community, which tended of course to favour the existing British institutions.

Perhaps the most interesting episode of this relationship was that of the rates crisis. Upon falling into Sinn Fein hands, Donegal County Council broke off official links with the Local Government Board, and instead pledged allegiance to Dail Eireann. Because of this, many people, and particularly unionists, grew reluctant to pay their rates. A Democrat editorial summed the problem up:

“…with the consent of the people, the County Council pledged allegiance to Dail Eireann. The loss of grants [£105,200] was the result…”

A typical example, both of the reluctance of unionists to pay the new (increased) rate and of the political and military wings of republicanism working together, can be found in the case of a Unionist by the name of Wilkinson. In late 1921 Wilkinson received a request to pay the “Tirchonaill County Council” the sum total of £5 17/4. Wilkinson refused to pay, and the result was a more sinister follow-up note from the O.C. of the “South Tyrconnill Brigade IRA” warning that

“any person found disobeying these orders will be severely dealt with”

By August 16^th the problem had reached crisis point and the County Council met to discuss the general rates situation. Much angst was targeted at prominent unionists:

“… some of the railway companies and Lord Leitrim and a few others had garnished their rates against malicious claims…”

A Unionist councillor, by the name of Clarke, defended himself against the charge; pointing out that he had called publicly for the payment of rates. However he went on to criticise Sinn Fein over the high level of rates. A particular point of contention was the fact that this high level of rates was partly the result of a SF refusal to take a printing tender from County Londonderry – opting instead for one from a nationalist area. Clarke also expressed doubt as to whether the SF rate collector was “properly appointed” and refused to pay his own rates until such time as this doubt was assuaged. He opined that this course of action would have the approval of the Local Government Board, which drew the weary retort that “they had bade adieu to that body long ago”

The imposition of the Belfast boycott on the county was also resisted by many unionists – one must always bear in mind of course the close economic links the county enjoyed with the rest of Ulster. On November 11^th 1920 the police recorded a threat sent to Patrick Duffy, a draper in Clonmany, warning him against purchasing goods from Belfast firms. During September of 1921 a “black list” was published of merchants with the temerity to continue trading in “prohibited British goods”.

The imposition of Sinn Fein courts was also a difficult episode, with both the Donegal Democrat and the Londonderry Sentinel routinely reporting proceedings from both Sinn Fein and official courts in the same issue. The RIC and military were often forced to heavily protect their own courtrooms, and there are numerous cases of RIC raids on Sinn Fein courts. There are also cases of sectarian harassment; in November of 1921 John Elkin, a Unionist from Moville needed police protection after refusing to stop working with the official courts. Many prominent Unionists were prominent in working with the official courts, with many serving as Justices of the Peace – Major Myles is a prime example.

However, it is probably fair to say that, whilst sectarian incidents grew in frequency throughout the period, complete polarisation of the communities did not occur, at least until the Civil War period when unionists were openly persecuted. A willingness to give credit where due can be seen in the comment by the Democrat in late 1921 that a military inquiry into the death of one of its staff was “most impartial”. The Democrat also strenuously condemned “cowardly and blackguardly”attacks on Protestant families in Tanawilly.

“The protestant boys are loyal and true though fashions are changed and the loyal are few”

Throughout this difficult period, the Orange Order held a particularly crucial position. By 1919 the Orange had laid deep roots within the Protestant population of East and South Donegal and there was much truth in the 1919 claim that “the Institution has more active adherents than ever”. Many 6 county Orangemen had supported their Donegal brethren in the UCC split in early 1920, with the result that cross-border Orange relations were never tinged with the same sense of betrayal under which cross-border Unionist co-operation laboured. In 1921 Major Moore, who was then County Grand Master of the Donegal County Lodge, chaired the main Twelfth celebrations in Londonderry. He recalled “glancing at the Orange lilies blooming at the door” when leaving for the parade, and concluded by congratulating “The Loyalists of Ulster for the magnificent result of the Northern elections”.

Across the border in Raphoe similar celebrations were held at Carrigane by the brethren of the Raphoe district lodge with what the Sentinel describes as “great enthusiasm and success”. Union flags and Orange lilies were everywhere to be seen, and the individual lodge banners depicted stirring scenes from recent Ulster history; such as the charge of the 36^th (Ulster) Division at the Somme. The Chair of these celebrations would have been speaking for many Donegal Orangeman in expressing his disappointment at Donegal’s exclusion from Northern Ireland as “he knew there were no more staunch and loyal Orangemen than those in that district of [East] Donegal”

The meeting concluded with motions passed declaring loyalty to the King and with the singing of the National Anthem. All in all, I believe it is possible to claim that the spirit of Orangeism in County Donegal survived the 1919-22 period remarkably well, especially given the decline in the Protestant population.

“…Our orange banners floating outshine the rebels all…”

Thus we can see that, despite the grave feelings of betrayal following the split with their fellow Unionists in Northern Ireland, Donegal Unionism, whilst suffering physically and numerically, largely managed to keep up it’s sense of self-identity through the “war of independence” period. It is undeniably true that IRA actions in Donegal, especially in 1922, contributed greatly to the startling decline in Protestantism in the County. However, because Unionists tended to be geographically concentrated in the East of the County, near the largely unionist agricultural hinterland in county Londonderry, they held together better than most.

Community relations did suffer during the war of independence, but not on a scale comparable with Northern Ireland. Open sectarian clashes were rare, with both communities seeming to prefer largely to retreat within their own culture, only emerging on occasion to snipe at “the other lot”. Tensions did exist, and were undeniable; with the incidents at Pettigo being a prime example of this.

Unionists did resist the republican take-over as best they could. However, at the end of the day, they were too few in number, and too weak organisationally to win through. They did succeed however in largely holding onto the areas in which they were strongest; as is evidenced by the fact that the 1925 Boundary Commission recommended the transfer of hardcore unionist areas in the far East and South of the county to Northern Ireland.

“then work and don’t surrender but come when duty calls”

Perhaps the greatest tribute however, to the efforts of Unionists in Donegal in the period 1919-22, can be seen in the fact that to this very day there exists a thriving, largely unionist, Protestant community in the County. Each summer the Orange Order in the county continues to march 15,000 strong with Union flags flying “as in days of yore”. At a political level, the aspirations of the community are reflected through the activities of the Donegal Progressive Party, which draws its support largely from the Protestant section of the community. During the 1987 general election the Unionist candidate, an independent from Belfast, outpolled the Labour Party.

During the war of independence two distinct, relatively ethnically homogenous, nations clashed against each other. It was in Ulster that the clash was most keenly felt, and Donegal was potentially a key flashpoint; representing as it did the farthest outposts of Unionist strength in the west of the Province. Ultimately, Donegal Unionists succeeded in holding the fort during this period, and therefore suffered proportionately less than the far more scattered loyalist communities throughout the South and West. Therefore, in conclusion, Donegal Unionists ensured that their identity was protected, retained and indeed cherished to this day.

Bibliography

• Jonathan Bardon, “A History of Ulster”
• Patrick Buckland (ed.), “Irish Unionism 1885-1923″ (Belfast, 1973)
• Curran, “The Birth of the Irish Free State” (Alabama, 1980)
• Geoffrey Hand (ed.) “Report of the Irish Boundary Commission 1925″ (London, 1969)
• Peter Hart in “Unionism in Modern Ireland” ed. Richard English and Graham Walker
• Shane Kenny, “Irish Politics Now”
• John M. Barkley, “Blackmouth and Dissenter” (Belfast, 1991)
• Neville McElderry, “Methodism in the Pettigo Area”
• Walter Alison Phillips, “The Revolution in Ireland 1906-23″ (London, 1923)
• Southern Irish Loyalist Relief Association, “The Plight of Southern Irish Loyalists” (London, 1921)
• ATQ Stewart, “The Ulster Crisis 1912-1914″ (Belfast, 1997)
• Ulster Unionist Council (Rev J.G. MacManaway), “Partition – Why Not?”
• Joan Vincent in “Ethnicity and the State” ed. Judith D. Toland (London, 1993)

• Donegal Democrat 1920-22
• Londonderry Sentinel 1921-22
• The Irish Times 1919-22

• Census Reports for “Saorstat Eireann” 1926
• CO 904/27 Reports on pre-war Ulster Volunteers
• CO 904/113 Monthly Police Reports 1920
• CO 904/152 Further Police Reports 1921

© David Christopher 2002 Reproduced with permission.

 

“The United Anglo-Celtic Isles
Will e’er be blessed by Freedoms smiles
No tyrant can our homes subdue
While Britons to the Celts are true.

The false may clamour to betray
The brave will still uphold our sway
The triple-sacred flag as yet
Supreme, its sun shall never set”

SOUTHERN UNIONIST BALLAD
(Ennis Unionist, 1914)

 

Introduction

In 1919 the Unionist community in County Cork was prosperous, numerous and committed in varying degrees to the Unionist cause. They had their own newspaper, held parades and maintained a complex social system. Yet by 1923 their community lay decimated, torn asunder by a campaign of murder and intimidation and forced into a supposedly “Free State” which did little to protect them. What brought about such cataclysmic changes? How was the campaign of murder conducted and for what reasons? Did Cork Unionism maintain it’s identity during those violent years – and can this still be seen today?

In this essay I hope to go some way towards answering these questions. There is an enormous amount of material on this period publicly available, most notably in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and in the National Library of Ireland. It is impossible in an essay of this size to give more than the briefest of overviews of these terrible times.

Crisis and Decline

The numerical decline between 1911 and 1926 of the Protestant (and mostly unionist) community in Cork, and indeed throughout Southern Ireland, is startling. The historian Hart puts the level of Protestant decline during this period at no less than 34% (the Roman Catholic population declined by merely 2%) and comments that

“this catastrophic loss was unique to the Southern minority and unprecedented: it represents easily the single greatest measurable social change of the revolutionary era”

It is difficult to argue with Hart’s assessment that this population decline is unique in British history – representing “the only example of the mass displacement of a native ethnic group within the British Isles since the 17th century”

Precise figures for the decline of Southern Protestantism can be seen by an examination of the 1926 census of Saorstat Eireann (the Irish Free State):

 

	Church of Ireland	Presbyterian	Methodists	Baptists	Total “Others”	Roman Catholics
1911	249,535	45,486	16,440	1,588	327,179	2,812,509
1926	164,215	32,429	10,663	717	220,723	2,751,269
% Decline	-34.2%	-28.7%	-35.1%	-54.8%	-32.5%	-2.2%

The decline in Cork was even more marked than in the rest of Southern Ireland:

	Church of Ireland	Presbyterian	Methodists	Baptists	Total “Others”	Roman Catholics
% Decline across SI	-34.2%	-28.7%	-35.1%	-54.8%	-32.5%	-2.2%
% Decline in Cork Co Borough	-52.8%	-61.6%	-38.7%	N/A	-49.8%	+9.2%
% Decline in Cork County	-40%	-54.9%	-40.4%	N/A	-40%	-6.0%

A closer examination of the census reveals that the pattern of decline was broadly similar across the county, although Protestants in Skibbereen escaped significantly more lightly than Protestants elsewhere, losing 1 in 3 of their number during the period:

 

	Roman Catholics	Others;
Cork County Borough*	+9.2%	-49.8%
Queenstown*	-6.5%	-54.9%
Youghal*	+0.5%	-57%
Mallow*	+7.5%	-54%
Bandon*	+0.9%	-45.5%
Middleton	-12.4%	-59%
Bantry	-11.1%	-52.2%
Skibbereen*	-10.4%	-33.2%
* denotes a branch of the Irish Unionist Alliance in the town

Thus we can see that the decline of Protestants in County Cork during the 1911-26 period was highly significant, and constituted the most significant demographic shift in the British Isles during that period. It cannot be attributed simply to rural population decline, as there is a large disparity between the figures for the decline of Roman Catholics and for the rest of the population. Hart points out that the decline was not spread evenly throughout the period 1911-26, citing the records of Protestant Sunday services in West Cork:

“After 1919 attendance fell by 22%, with more than two-thirds of the decline taking place in a single year – 1922″

Nor can this decline be seen as merely a part of a wider pattern of Protestant decline occuring since the middle of the 19th century.

“A change in administration would be anathema to them”

There is no single reason for the decline of the unionist community in Cork during the war of independence period. Much of this essay concentrates on the campaign of murder carried out against Cork Loyalists, however it must be remembered that other factors accounted at least in part for the decline. For instance the departure of Union forces from the Cork area; as Hart points out:

“Departing soldiers, sailors, policemen and their families account for about one quarter of the emigrants, a significant contributing factor although ultimately a minor one.”

There is often a tendency to point to the Great War as a reason for the decline of Southern Protestantism. However an analysis of sign-up figures demonstrates clearly that Southern Protestants had quite a low volunteering rate (there was no conscription in Ireland) – one broadly similar to that of their Catholic neighbours. Both Southern Catholics and Protestants were far less inclined to sign up for King and Country than were Ultonian Catholics and Protestants. As Hart concludes “it was not the world war that blighted Southern Protestantism, but what came after”.

“Down the mardyke thro’ each elm tree”

In 1919 the Unionist community in Cork was relatively prosperous and committed to the Unionist cause. Their views were reflected through the local unionist organ, the Cork Constitution, which trumpeted that

“The Cork Constitution is read daily and exclusively by people representing a greater purchasing power than all the readers of all the other papers published in Munster”

In July 1919 the paper positively glowed with pride in being British; reflecting the wider pride felt in the Cork Unionist community at the declaration of Peace and the return of soldiers, Catholic and Protestant, from the front. Particular emphasis was placed on the flying of the Union flag. The paper carried reports from all over Munster and the Kingdom as to how Peace Day had been celebrated. At Skibbereen the paper records “A large Union Jack floated from the Post Office buildings, the Protestant Church, Hollybrook House and other residences throughout the day”. In the Unionist stronghold of Bandon the paper commented that “The Union Jack was floated proudly from the Tower of St Peters church”. As the editorial asserted.

“The citizens of Cork have every reason to feel proud with one of two exceptions the shops in Patrick Street, King Street and other main thoroughfares stopped business for the day and from their premises hung the Union Jack and Allied flags in considerable numbers”

Corkonians had suffered during the Great War; a survey of gravestones at Bandon contained a number of those who had died, including “Private D. Chambers, Royal Munster Fusiliers, 6th November 1917 aged 32″ and “Timothy O’Leary, Telegraphist, RN.342012, HMS Defiance, 26th May 1914, aged 20″. Many of those who did survive to return to Cork ended up as targets for the IRA, regardless of whether they were Catholic or Protestant.

Many in Cork, both Catholic and Protestant, would have shared the sentiments of pride and remembrance expressed in the Constitution in mid-1919. During the war itself Cork was relatively united behind the war effort in the early years. Following the 1916 rising the Council, controlled by the Home Rule party, declared:

“That we the Cork County Council wish to assure His Majesty the King of our Loyal Support in the government of our country”

Cricket was a particularly popular sport amongst unionists in the county, and was played regularly before and during the war of independence. The arrival of Union soldiers from the mainland contributed to this, with the Constitution often carrying reports on military cricket matches. Cork County Cricket club was something of a bastion of unionism, with prominent Irish Unionist Alliance activist the Earl of Bandon among it’s patrons. The centenary of the club comments that:

“After the last war there was a considerable revival of the game in Munster. The League was more keenly contested and there were more frequent visitors to the Mardyke”

By late 1919 however the Sinn Fein revolution had gathered ground and this concern was reflected through the pages of the Constitution. In Queenstown notices started appearing urging the populace to shun the police service as “spies and traitors” . Early in 1920 the editorial talked with growing concern of an “organisation of desperadoes who are prepared to hesitate at no crime” – this was prompted by the IRA attack on the police station at Carrigtwohill . On January 9th an attempt was made to murder Sir Alfred Dobbin, “one of the leading merchants of Cork, a staunch Unionist” – which led to sensationalist headlines in the Constitution. IRA gunman Michael O’Suilleabhain recalls that 1920 “had opened with a general attack on RIC barracks throughout the county” . The nightmare was beginning.

“Has fair play been extended to the loyalists of Ireland?”

Early in 1920 the Unionist minority was spread throughout the county. However unionists do appear to have been concentrated in Cork city, Queenstown, and in towns and villages in rural West Cork such as Bandon and Skibbereen. Both of the latter villages for example proudly flew the Union flag to mark the victory in WW1; “A large Union Jack floated from the Post Office buildings, the Protestant Church, Hollybrook House and other residences throughout the day” .

The Irish Unionist Alliance and Unionist Anti-Partition League were organised throughout the county. Whilst the Constitution tended to take the side of the IUA, it gave over many column inches to covering the activities of both groupings. The IUA had district branches organised in Bandon, Buttevant, Charleville, Clonakilty, Dunmanway, Durras, Fermoy, Glanmire, Innishannon, Kilmun, Mallow, Mitchelstown, Monkstown, Muskerry, Newmarket, Queenstown, Rosscarberry, Skibbereen, Schull, Timoleague and Youghal, as well as in Cork city itself.

Referring to the Queenstown urban council the republican historian McCarthy talks witheringly of the “unionist influences still strongly embedded in the town” asserting that “the UDC had several unionists in its midst”. O’Callaghan, Saunders and Downing were three such unionists, forced to term themselves independents as “there was little else they could have called themselves in the political climate that prevailed at the time.”

Referring to Bandon the ex-IRA man Liam Deasy comments that it’s inhabitants had “changed little in their loyalties with the passing of the years they could scarcely have been more opposed to the Volunteers”

Skibbereen on the other hand was the home of the local Skibbereen Eagle which upheld a fiercely loyalist line, in direct competition to it’s competitor the Southern Star which was pro-nationalist in sympathies.

Republican hatred of the Irish Unionist community in these areas shines through the work of such historians as McCarthy, Deasy and McDonnell. The pro-British minority community were clearly seen as an obstacle in the way of the IRAs separatist ambitions. Most in the IRA would have regarded Protestants as opposing their aims and, at worst, as “spies and traitors”.

Therefore, throughout 1920 the IRA began a systematic campaign of murdering those whom they felt were not entirely sympathetic to their cause. By mid-July the revolution had gathered ground and the Constitution began to reflect the views of a community which saw itself as being increasingly isolated and under siege. This sense of isolation translated itself easily into strong support for the police and for the concept of Law and Order. Under the headline “Ireland in Revolution” the editorial reminded readers that “Seven shocking murders have been perpetrated in West Cork” – going on to call for greater assistance for the loyal community in the county. “Crime in Ireland” became a central editorial theme and horror was expressed at the Sinn Fein practice of

“dragging young girls from their beds and shearing off their hair with every circumstance of terror as a means of intimidating them from associating with policemen and soldiers”

In the light of such IRA activity it is hardly surprising that the paper commented with satisfaction on the “armed constabulary” shutting down a Sinn Fein court in Foynes. The paper also carried in full a government notice announcing a curfew for Cork – a tactic which had the whole-hearted support of the editor.

Later in 1920 a republican fisherman came across his daughter courting a young British soldier. The daughter was sent home in disgrace whilst the fisherman and his son “strangled the soldier with their bare hands”

“It is time they and their sort were out of the country!”

It was in the early months of 1921 however that the IRA reign of terror reached its peak. The Southern Irish Loyalist Relief Association began publishing long lists of those unionists, Protestant and Catholic, who had been murdered or otherwise harrassed by republicans. One such pamphlet recalled the case of Alfred Cotter, “a master-baker living in Bandon” who was taken from his home in his mother’s presence and shot dead. His crime was that he supplied bread to the local police.

Those few loyalists brave enough to supply information on terrorist activities to the police service faced a similarly terrible fate. Two Skibbereen unionists, Sweetnam and O’Connoll, were murdered on February 23rd for having “given evidence against a man who had been levying subscriptions for the IRA” . As the relief workers commented “it is as much as a loyal man’s life is worth to be seen entering a police barracks in many parts”. James Beale, a Protestant, was kidnapped and shot for fraternising with local Auxiliaries.

Others were murdered for lesser crimes – Alfred Reilly was executed as “a leading member of the Methodist body in Cork” whilst on March 6th a young Protestant girl in Castletownbere had her hair shaved off for fraternising with Union soldiers.

In April Michael O’Keefe, an ex-serviceman, was dragged from his bed in Carrigtwohill by IRA terrorists – his body was later discovered with an IRA claim that the dead man was “a convicted spy” . This was a pattern that was terrifyingly familiar to Cork’s minority unionist community and to ex-servicemen.

The IRA carried the war to Protestant social activities also; on the 29th of June Deasy recalls an attack on a “Protestant social hall” in Bandon. Deasy, claiming that the social hall was “earmarked for enemy occupation” proudly recalls how “a party of Volunteers daringly burnt the building to the ground”.

Richer Protestants suffered alongside their working-class and farmer co-religionists. Dunboy mansion was torched by the IRA – a neighbour, Albert Thomas recalls:

“One night I was called up and was shown a very large glow in the sky overlooking the castle about a mile away. The rebels had burned the castle down as they said they would. I was very sorry; sorry for all the lovely old silver, the beautiful glass and splendid linen all being burnt, all those gorgeous statutes and pictures, the wonderful drawing-room all burning for what? One can understand war with all its horrors, but this seemed to me a very wanton thing to do”

The quote from Thomas sums up admirably the confusion and despair felt by the unionist minority in the area at what seemed to them to be an IRA assault on their culture and whole way of life. The IRA excuse for the burning of Dunboy, that “the castle would be used as a garrison for British soldiers” rapidly became a stock excuse for attacks on unionist property.

Intimidation of known unionists began to follow a familiar pattern. An initial demand for money was likely, if refused, to be followed up by the theft of a farmer’s livestock. Hart writes that “simple dissent with IRA demands condemned many… very few were guilty of aiding the enemy”.

By 1921 news of the massacres had reached Dublin, leading the Irish Times to refer to the incidents as “pogroms” – commenting on Southern Unionists generally it asserted that

“All of them have not yet experienced such pogroms as that of West Cork; but few have been without distinct intimidation”

Boycotting of unionists was also a common republican tactic. As John Clarke, a Unionist in Dunmanway wrote to the compensation claim commission in 1927

“I was boycotted in 1921,1923 and 1923 because I was known to be a loyalist”

Clarke recounts a litany of low level intimidation – money was stolen, as was food and corrugated iron. In December of 1921 he was accosted a grouping of ten terrorists who demanded he serve them dinner. He refused “although their captain threatened me” – his wife, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, was terrified by the IRA activity and “a week after gave premature birth to twins” – one of whom was stillborn. A doctor had to attend upon his wife “for six months afterwards”.

As sympathisers on the mainland commented:

“All the public hear is a brief announcement that Mr A or Mr B has been taken out of bed and shot – but what a tragedy of broken hearts and agonising scenes lies behind the bald reports in the newspapers”

As time went on the IRA resorted to ever-more brutal tactics in order to terrorise the minority into submission. During the “Truce” a Cork Unionist wrote anonymously that

“the IRA are now billeting their men on private residences near here. In one case a widow lady had to give dinner and beds to seven”

It was around this time that the police and army began systematically evacuating their barracks – leading the anonymous commentator to assert bitterly that “loyalists are being left without any protection whatsoever either for their person or property” . The IRA took full advantage of this helplessness, stepping up their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Spring of 1922. Hart recalls that “churches were marked for destruction in order to intimidate or punish their congregations” .

Why?

One might assume from all this that the minority community in Cork were engaged in an organised plot against the republican insurrection. The opposite was true. Hart points out that during the great period of Irish political mobilisation from 1912-1922 all the Southern Unionists were able to come up with was the Irish Unionist Alliance which, whilst effective for its size, was not a mass organisation. Whilst pro-British most unionists didn’t play an active part in politics, and were mindful of their position – scattered amongst an increasingly threatening nationalist population.

Despite leaflets urging Unionists to inform anonymously on the IRA there is little evidence that many plucked up the courage to do so. One police constable, Brewer, recalls that Unionists were “afraid to be accused of giving us news they kept away from us altogether”. The IRA claim that the Unionist community posed a serious threat to their operations simply doesn’t hold water in the light of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The fact that Unionists joined nationalists in reacting with outrage to the burning of Cork city demonstrates that, whilst pro-British, they were unwilling to go along with the excesses of some of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries. An editorial in the Constitution called for an independent inquiry into the burnings:

“The demand for a satisfying inquiry is becoming irresistible and should it not be forthcoming the public will naturally draw conclusions by no means complimentary to the Administration”

Even when provoked by the IRA campaign Unionists failed to respond effectively, although some local unionists did risk their lives to help the army and police. Where resistance did occur it was “spontaneous, unorganised and almost always punished with the utmost severity” . Information from one unionist however was responsible for the near annihilation of the East Cork IRA terrorist group; needless to say the unionist paid for this with his life.

However even when unionists didn’t respond they remained targeted. Hart comments that:

“In the Irish revolution an unobtrusive unionist was still a unionist as Richard Williams found out when the IRA burned his house outside Macroom in June 1921 his situation could stand for that of thousands of others”

A friend of Williams recalled that “they could have left him alone I suppose, but they didn’t leave anyone alone, that’s the point”.

IRA man O’ Suilleabhain does defend his unit’s activities; “We burned no house occupied by a civilian, loyalist or otherwise” – however he does concede that “in other areas it is true that the IRA reacted to this [army activity] by burning loyalist homes”.

Hence we can see that, even when politically inactive, Protestants and Unionists were still targeted. Not all IRA violence was religiously based however; in terms of IRA attacks on the Catholic population they were largely directed at ex-servicemen – the loyalist relief association asserted that “many Catholics have been shot by the IRA particularly ex-servicemen whose lot in the South is truly deplorable”.

Nor was the violence class-based. Of the 113 houses burnt to the ground by the IRA just 15% belonged to Catholics – in a 90% Catholic county. Many of the Protestants murdered were working-class – Robert Eady, murdered on February 12th 1921 in Cork city is a case in point.

In conclusion therefore it seems clear that the Cork pogroms occurred for a variety of reasons. Primarily republicans appear to have seized the opportunity to work off old sectarian grievances, targeting Protestants out of all proportion to their numbers, and regardless of the fact that they posed but a marginal political threat to the aspirations of Sinn Fein. However Catholics seen as being associated with Britain or Britishness also suffered, as the attacks on Catholic ex-servicemen prove. At a very basic level the Cork pogroms were motivated not for political reasons or class envy but simply out of a sense of sectarian anti-British hatred on the part of the IRA.

“In parts of county cork life is one long nightmare”

The events of the war of independence in County Cork, and throughout Southern Ireland, was to have lasting ramifications on the unionist community there. Even today many Unionists South of the border refuse to refer to the 1919-23 period as the “war of independence”, opting instead for the more emotive term “the reign of Sinn Fein terror” , a term which perhaps accurately sums up the unionist experience of the republican revolution.

The period plunged the Protestant community in Cork into a period of decline. As TCD Senator Mary Henry asserted in a speech to the young unionist group in Trinity College; “once a small community grows smaller it can only decline”. From the winter of 1920 onwards thousands of ordinary Protestants and unionists throughout West Cork “spent many nights away from home, sleeping in barns and fields. While IRA volunteers were going on the run from their enemies, these people were on the run from the IRA”.

The numerous boxes of compensation claims from the county, still held in the Public Records Office in NI bear impressive testament to the suffering of Cork Unionists at the hands of the IRA. Many were to flee to Northern Ireland or the mainland, never to return.

It is unsurprising therefore that such a ghastly period was to have a lasting bearing on the attitudes of Unionists in County Cork. However the Unionist identity was maintained. The Skibbereen Eagle maintained it’s staunch loyalist editorial line until closing down in 1929; the Constitution had effectively been shut down during the Civil War.

Many people in the county still hold to their Unionist heritage and their British identity , boosted by an influx of immigrants from the mainland. In 1987 a Unionist candidate, Stan Gebler-Davies, stood in rural Cork and polled several hundred votes, proving once again the old maxim that political traditions never really die out; they merely hibernate until given the opportunity to revive themselves.

Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Newspapers: Cork Constitution, Cork Examiner, Irish Times
Public Records Office NI: D/989/B/3/8-13 (Compensation Claims), D/989/A/5 (Registry of IUA branches), D/989/A/11/12/1 (satirical Corkonian unionist verses), D/989/A/9/30 (Plight of Southern Irish Loyalists), D/989/C/1/21 (Southern Unionist Patriotic Verses) and others
1926 Census of Saorstat Eireann
CO 904, County Inspector Records
Private conversations with modern-day Southern Unionists

Secondary Sources:

Irish Labour Party, “Who Burnt Cork City?”
Tom Barry, “The reality of the Anglo-Irish war in West Cork”
Liam Deasy, “Towards Ireland Free”
Richard English and Graham Walker (eds.), “Unionism in Modern Ireland”
K. K McDonnell, “There is a bridge at Bandon”
Peter Someville-Large, “The coast of West Cork”
Edward Marnane, “Cork County Council 1899-1985″
Various, “The history of Killavullen”
Various, “Bandon Gravestone Inscriptions”
Cork County Cricket Club, “Cork CCC centenary publication”
Sean Beecher, “The story of Cork”
Cooke and Scanlon, “Guide to the history of Cork”
Michael O’Suilleabhain, “Where Mountainy Men have Sown”
Kieran McCarthy, “Cobh’s Contribution to the Fight for Irish Freedom”
Mary Broderick, “A history of Queenstown / Cobh”

APPENDIX:

A Sample of the Murders of Cork Unionists January – March 1921
(Source: Southern Irish Loyalist Relief Association papers)

January 27th Thomas Bradfield Bandon
February 2nd Mrs King Mallow
February 3rd Tom Bradfield Desertserges
February 12th Robert Eady Cork
February 15th W Sullivan Cork
February 16th James Coffey Bandon
February 16th Jimmy Coffey Bandon
February 16th J Beale Cork (Mr Beale’s father-in-law and brother- in law also murdered on the same day)
February 18th Mrs Lindsay Coachford
February 23rd William Connell Skibbereen
February 23rd Dan McDonnell Cork
February 23rd Matthew Sweetnam Skibbereen
February 28th A Cotter Ballineen
March 3rd J Cotter Cork
March 12th John Good Timoleague
March 25th John Cathcart Youghal
March 30th William Good Timoleague
March 31st Donovan Bandon

 

© David Christopher 2002 Reproduced with permission

 

David Trimble touched on a few raw nerves with his assertion that the Irish Republic (in which I was born and where I live) is a “mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, sectarian state”. But he did succeed in lighting the touch paper for quite an unprecedented debate – from which a lot can be learnt about life in the Republic today. It may seem odd to some that the comments of a unionist leader could have generated such debate among a Southern audience long hardened to the rhetoric of people like Paisley. But, unlike Paisley, Trimble enjoys a sort of gritty respect in the Republic – the kind of respect a boxer might have for his opponent having gone the full thirteen rounds. Trimble has a reputation for “hanging on in there”, and for standing up both to the hard-line opponents in his own party and to the IRA. He is far more listened to in the South than any unionist leader ever has been.

This explains the way in which many in the South initially seemed taken-aback by his comments. There was much soul-searching in the aftermath – “Is Trimble merely reverting to type as a tribal leader?” you could hear people ask themselves. “Or does he have a real point?”. What is certain is that Trimble used up a lot of his accumulated political goodwill in the Republic in making the comments that he did. However, he succeeded in sparking a debate in the Republic like never before, and this is what will surely be worth more in the long run.

The response to Trimble’s comments was not slow in coming, and was led by the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who was only too glad to distract attention both from a bad result for his Fianna Fáil party in the abortion referendum, and from the substance of Trimble’s speech – the call for a border poll. Over the next week, Irish newspapers and airwaves were filled with the spectacle of politicians and media pundits raising their voice in outrage. Some Protestant clergymen seemed to be falling over themselves in their eagerness to get on RTÉ and parade their loyalty to the Republic.

Of course, there was nothing particularly new about this. After all, a sizeable chunk of the Protestant minority in the Republic is indeed happily integrated, particularly those living in urban areas. Many clergymen feel the same way, and are only too happy to avail of any opportunity to distance themselves from their rambunctious Northern co-religionists.

What was most significant about the aftermath of Trimble’s comments was the willingness of people from the Britishminority in the Republic – as distinct from the Protestant minority – to join the debate. Not only were Reform Movement heavyweights – such as Bruce Arnold and Ruth Dudley Edwards – involved, but so too were a multitude of new voices from across the country.

The fact that a debate of this nature took place at all is remarkable. For those in the minority over the last 80 years, the tendency has very much been to stay quiet about matters political. “Keeping the head below the parapet” is an oft-heard phrase; indeed, since independence and the violence of 1919-1923, quiescence has been the sine qua non of minority participation in public life. When you consider the isolation and vulnerability of many in the minority – particularly those living in rural areas – this attitude is not difficult to understand. For most of the period since independence, views critical of nationalist orthodoxy could be aired only in private.

Now, such dissident views are being expressed on the letters pages of the national dailies – The Irish Times in particular – and they help us to delineate the present extent of minority aspirations in the Republic today. For this reason, it is not my intention to give a “blow-by-blow” account of the media debate, but rather to pin down the major themes, and the areas in which there is room for improvement in the conduct of majority-minority relations.

The Historical Context

The minority cannot be understood without reference to the historical background, and in particular to the period between 1919-1923. As Bruce Arnold has pointed out, the minority today draws on two distinct historical traditions – the Southern Unionists, who were mostly Protestants, and the Redmondites, who were mostly Catholic. A century ago, these traditions were in opposition to each other. But both traditions were profoundly traumatised by the events of the 1919-23 War of Independence. Many people were forced to flee their homes, and for most of those who stayed behind the period marked the end of their participation in the public life of the country. Protestants bore the brunt of the violence – between 1911 and 1926, Southern Ireland lost 32.5% of her Protestants, and just 2.2% of her Catholics.

Precise figures for this decline can be obtained from the 1926 Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) census:

Table I: Protestant population decline in Southern Ireland, 1911-1926

 

	Church of Ireland	Presbyterian	Methodist	Baptists	Total “Others”	Roman Catholics
1911	249,535	45,486	16,440	1,588	327,179	2,812,509
1926	164,215	32,429	10,663	717	220,723	2,751,269
% Decline	-34.2%	-28.7%	-35.1%	-54.8%	-32.5%	-2.2%

Source: Saorstát Éireann, Census Figures, 1926

The decline of the Protestant population cannot be attributed simply to rural population decline, as there is such a large disparity between the figures for the decline of the Catholic population and the figures for the rest of the population.

The experience of Protestants in County Cork during 1919-1923 presents a compelling case study. Their story was well documented in the local newspaper, the Cork Constitution. In 1919, there was a relatively large Protestant minority in the county, who expressed themselves freely. For instance, on the return of soldiers from the Great War in 1919, the Cork Constitution records that

“At Skibbereen, a large Union Jack floated from the Post Office buildings, the Protestant Church, Hollybrook House and other residences… throughout the day”

While in Cork city itself on the same day:

“With one of two exceptions the shops in Patrick Street, King Street and other main thoroughfares stopped business for the day and from their premises hung the Union Jack and Allied flags in considerable numbers.“

 

Both Southern Unionist parties – the Irish Unionist Alliance and the Unionist Anti-Partition League – were organised in the county. This was no token presence – the Irish Unionist Alliance for example had district branches in Bandon, Buttevant, Charleville, Clonakilty, Dunmanway, Durras, Fermoy, Glanmire, Innishannon, Kilmun, Mallow, Mitchelstown, Monkstown, Muskerry, Newmarket, Queenstown, Rosscarberry, Skibbereen, Schull, Timoleague and Youghal, as well as in Cork city itself.

The IRA opened 1920 with an attack against the police station in Carrigtwohill. On January 8^th they attempted to murder Sir Alfred Dobbin, “one of the leading merchants of Cork – a staunch unionist”. By mid-July seven more people had been murdered, and in general violence was stepped up throughout the county. It was in 1921 however that the violence reached its peak.

Two Skibbereen unionists, Sweetnam and O’Connoll, were murdered on February 23^rd 1921 for having “given evidence against a man who had been levying subscriptions for the IRA”. Others were targeted for lesser crimes – James Beale, a Protestant, was kidnapped and shot for fraternising with local Auxiliaries. On March 6^th a young Protestant girl in Castletownbere had her hair shaved off for fraternising with British soldiers. In April Michael O’Keefe, an ex-serviceman, was dragged from his bed in Carrigtwohill by the IRA – his body was later discovered along with an IRA claim that the dead man was “a convicted spy”. This was a pattern that grew to be terrifyingly familiar to Cork’s minority community and to ex-servicemen.

Intimidation of known unionists followed a definite pattern. An initial demand for money was likely, if refused, to be followed up by the theft of a farmer’s livestock. Historian Peter Hart emphasises that “simple dissent with IRA demands condemned many… very few were guilty of aiding the enemy“. By mid-1921, 113 houses had been burnt to the ground by the IRA, 85% of which were Protestant (in a county where Protestants constituted 10% of the population). Most Protestants didn’t wait to get burnt out; they simply upped and left. Hart recalls that from the winter of 1920 onwards

“Protestants spent many nights away from home, sleeping in barns and fields. While IRA volunteers were going on the run from their enemies, these people were on the run from the IRA.”

These experiences devastated the Protestant community in Cork. The Protestant population of Cork city (Cork County Borough) dropped by 49.8%. In Bantry the drop was 52.2%, in Cóbh / Queenstown it was 54.9%, in Midleton 59%. Hart has estimated from the records of Protestant Sunday services in the county, that two-thirds of this decline took place in 1921-22. Although the violence in Cork was particularly intense, this experience was a microcosm of the experience of Protestants right across the country, especially those living in rural areas. These experiences constitute a chapter in history, a chapter which even today goes unmentioned in the textbooks of the Republic’s schoolchildren. After 1919-23, things would never be the same again.

A Problem of Definition – Who are the minority?

During the media debate which followed Trimble’s comments, perhaps the most concrete contribution from circles close to the Irish Government was Dr. Martin Mansergh’s article of March 22^nd in the Irish Independent. In this article, Dr. Mansergh argued that “occasional and mostly unintentional insensitivities” notwithstanding, the Republic’s conduct towards its “religious minorities” had been “honourable”.

The emphasis on religion is understandable, given Dr. Mansergh’s own background as both a Protestant and a Republican. Such an emphasis does, however, obscure the fact that the minority cannot be characterised by labelling them as Protestant – in fact, it is rather difficult to pin an exact label on the minority. Labels such as “Unionist” or “Anglo-Irish” or “Protestant”, which may have been appropriate in 1922, fail to adequately encapsulate the rather complex and heterogonous nature of the minority today. For one thing, since independence there has been a convergence with the Redmondite tradition – the best one can do today is to say that the minority consists of those whose identity is both Irishand British, and that it almost certainly contains more Catholics than Protestants. Perhaps somewhat ironically, the description “West British”, which has traditionally been used in a derogatory fashion by nationalists, fits the bill better than most.

The common denominator, then, is not one of religion, but rather one of identity – the feeling of a sense of British identity, alongside an Irish or Ultonian identity. Such layering or coupling of identities is not seen as unusual anywhere else in the British Isles, where one can quite happily be Welsh and British, Asian and Welsh, West Indian and English. The principle that people in Northern Ireland can be Irish or British or both is central to the Good Friday Agreement. Yet the Irish Government seem to be at something of a loss when it comes to applying the same principles to those within its own borders who quite happily see themselves as being both British and Irish.

Minority Concerns Today

Probably the best way to estimate the size of the minority is to look at the number of people in the Republic today who hold British citizenship. The British Embassy has informed the Reform Movement that there are roughly 250,000 – 300,000 British passport holders living in the Irish Republic; of whom about 80,000 were born there. Given that both Ireland and the UK are European Union members, and that there are no discernible practical advantages to holding a passport of one sort or the other, it is reasonable to conclude that most of these 80,000 Irish-born people who hold a British passport do so for reasons of identity.

Then there are those who would like to hold a British passport, but who are precluded from doing so, by virtue of having been born after the Treaty in 1922. This is because British citizenship does not in itself confer a right to British citizenship upon one’s offspring. Instead, the litmus test is birth within the United Kingdom. Let’s take the case of “Arthur”, born in Cavan in 1913, when the whole of the island was within the United Kingdom. His son “Bill”, born to Arthur after independence, has a right to British citizenship through descent. However Bill’s son “Charles” has no such right, because Bill is merely a British citizen, and is not viewed as being “British born”.

Thus, as the years go by, fewer and fewer people within the West British minority retain the right to British citizenship. It is unsurprising therefore that the demand for symmetry on citizenship rights has emerged as one of the most important planks in the Reform Movement’s policy platform. David Trimble spoke out in favour of such symmetry as long ago as 1998, saying

“The concept of parity of esteem, insofar as it has any meaning, ought to apply in the Republic, and people there who regard themselves as British and wish to take advantage of their British heritage should have the right to claim British citizenship. And with that should come the right to a British passport. Simple justice and fairness demands such a move.”

Concerns about the issue of citizenship rights are underpinned by the perception among many in the Republic that the principle of “Parity of Esteem” stops at Dundalk – in other words, that it is something which the Irish Government wish to see applied to Northern Ireland, but not in their own backyard.

As Bernard Barton writes in The Irish Times:

“Notwithstanding the declared and often repeated policy of the Irish Government that parity of esteem must be afforded to both traditions in Northern Ireland, the Taoiseach and Ministers of his party in government still refuse to practise in this State what they would have others do in Northern Ireland”.

Such concerns go far beyond the issue of citizenship. Barton went on to criticise the destruction by the State of monuments associated with the minority tradition – Nelson’s Pillar in O’Connell Street, the Goff Memorial in the Phoenix Park and the statue of William of Orange that used to stand in College Green. In similar vein, Corkman Ted Neville argued – again in the Irish Times – that

“Mono-ethnic, mono-cultural is not a derogatory description and is essentially correct. As regards being sectarian, one can recall the fact that the Dublin / Wicklow lodge of the Orange Order had to cancel its parade to unveil a plaque at the place of foundation in Dawson Street just two years ago, to avoid the clamour of ‘irate’ protestors.”

 

These and similar themes were touched upon last year, when the Peace and Reconciliation Platform (based in the Glencree Centre) released a report entitled “Peace Building in the Irish Republic”. The report cast a withering eye over the Republic’s track record on pluralism, and – particularly worthy of note – recommended the establishment of a Conflict Transformation Agency to tackle the problem of sectarianism in the Republic. One of the major points raised by the Peace and Reconciliation Platform concerned the teaching of history in the Republic’s schools. This issue was touched on by Shane Johnston who, writing in the Irish Independent, pointed out that

“The selective cultural and historical amnesia at hand today in the Republic of Ireland is such that it underpins much of the current history curricula taught in our schools at Junior and Leaving Certificate level. The interpretation of the past is fully compatible with popular nationalist beliefs about Ireland and it is a sad and damning reflection that, by completion of their state education, our young adults know nothing of the history, culture and beliefs of any tradition or religion but their own”.

 

Indisputably this was the case in the past. DeValera, for one, saw the teaching of history as little more than a useful way of inculcating patriotism in the young. But it is also truer of the present than many would care to admit. The core Leaving Certificate text dealing with Irish History, “Ireland since 1870″, mentioned nothing about the Southern Unionist tradition, and devoted just one chapter to the history and beliefs of the Ulster Unionists. Even where unionists are talked about, heavy emphasis gets laid on the economic reasons for wanting to maintain ties to Great Britain, rather than on the validity of unionism as an equal cultural, political and historical tradition on the island. There is a widespread misperception in the South of Northern Unionists as a parsimonious, money-grubbing people, whose primary attachment to the Union is economic, and thus only skin-deep.

The Religious Dimension

Finally, we come to rather more familiar territory – the religious dimension to the debate. Wesley Boyd, a former director of news at RTE, argued in the Irish Times for the abolition of the Angelus. Whilst he felt that David Trimble’s comments were“exaggerated and self-serving”, he pointed out that

“if David Trimble wants evidence to support his contention that the Republic, he need only point to the daily broadcast of the Angelus on RTE”

 

The debate over the Angelus was not one-sided. Martin Mansergh expressed the view that “Protestants would be a truly petty people, if we were to object to all Catholic symbolism”. Eoin Neeson, a former director of the Government Information Bureau, opined that “there are individuals of the Reformed Churches who do not recognise what the Angelus actually is” - according to Neeson, this view is but “simple ignorance” and “cannot be a satisfactory reason for ending the Angelus broadcast” - particularly given that the majority “have important and marked representative rights which minorities do not necessarily share” .

Geraldine Watts of Stillorgan was prompted to wonder whether this intervention might not be “an elaborate hoax”. She pointed out that sentiments such as those expressed by Mr Neeson

“must cause Northern Protestants to wonder how their traditions would be regarded in a united Ireland” .

The Angelus and other religious themes recurred again and again. In his own inimitable style, Eoghan Harris recalled a litany of specifically Protestant grievances, which is well worth repeating in detail:

“At the start of the last century, the Ne Temere decree, which was a death sentence to small Protestant communities. In 1922, sectarian murders, ethnic cleansing and, of course, compulsory Irish which kept Protestants out of the public service. In the 1930s, the Irish Constitution, the special place for the Catholic church and the Protestant woman who was not deemed suitable to be a County Librarian.

In the 1940s and post-war period, the aggressive pickets on the Dublin Church mission and the attacks on poppy sellers. In the 1950s, the boycott of Fethard-on-Sea and the bigotry of Archbishop McQuaid. In my living memory, the brutal GAA ban and Protestant hurlers kneeling to kiss the Roman Catholic bishop’s ring, the breaking of windows in Protestant churches during H Block protests.

In the last few years, I recall the old Huguenot cemetery in Cork which was called Bishop Lucey Park against all decent opinion, the daily stoning of Protestant school buses in County Monaghan, the squeezing out of Protestant councillors in a part of Donegal”.

Again, some will say that whilst such sectarian undercurrents may have characterised life in the Republic in the past, this is not the case today. Yet even in the very recent past there is the example of an abortion referendum during which the old alliance between the Catholic Church and Fianna Fáil was resurrected, and during which the Catholic church campaigned vigorously for a “yes” vote. To make matters worse, the Fianna Fáil government made little effort to secure the support of any religious group other than the Catholic church, and the referendum ended up being opposed by the Protestant churches and by the Jewish community. The impression was created even amongst the most apolitical non-Catholics of a return to the worst days of majoritarianism.

Also in the very recent past, there is the case of the School Principal, Tomás Ó’Dúlaing, who objected to the practise in his school (Gaelscoil Thulach na nÓg, Dunboyne, County Meath) of Protestant schoolchildren having to remove themselves from class whilst their Catholic schoolmates were being taught the Catechism. In April of this year, the principal pointed out that this amounted in practise to religious segregation of children at a very young age. Ó’Dúlaing suggested that all concerned would be better off if the Catholic schoolchildren could be taught religious doctrine outside of school hours. Parents and teachers agreed – yet the school’s Board of Management is now trying to sack him.

Conclusion

It is doubtful whether even David Trimble himself could have foreseen what the effects of his party conference address would be. Whether by accident or good fortune, his comments were propitiously timed. In the immediate aftermath of an abortion referendum that polarised the country down the middle, the Republic was perhaps more open to a period of self-questioning than would otherwise have been the case. Secondly, Eoghan Harris has pointed out that the first sign of a minority starting to feel secure, is that it starts to complain – and at the time the debate took place, the IRA had at last begun the process of actual decommissioning.

As we have seen, the debate in the media ranged over any number of topics, and touched on themes of religion, politics and culture which lie at the heart of the Republic’s society. There was however one underlying theme throughout the debate – that you cannot isolate the situation in the Republic from the situation in Northern Ireland. The post-1998 framework of mutual recognition and mutual respect, which applies in Northern Ireland, ought also apply in the Republic.

It is not good enough to draw a line around the border, and state “thus far shall parity of esteem go, and no further”. There is no wall along the border in real life, particularly when it comes to the three Ulster counties in the Republic. Through links of religion and sport, through membership in the loyal institutions and through family ties, a deep network has evolved down through the years, connecting Northern Ireland Protestants with their co-religionists in the South. It is not difficult for a man living in Tyrone, Fermanagh or Armagh to look across the border and observe how the identity of his co-religionists in Cavan, Donegal or Monaghan is treated. Furthermore, it is not unreasonable for such a man to conclude that this is how his own identity would be treated should there ever be a United Ireland.

The situation in the Republic may be different in any number of respects, but in London. it is not separate. If the Republic cannot accommodate the hopes and dreams of the small and pretty mild-mannered British minority in their own midst, it would seem to render rather ludicrous their claim to ever be able to absorb “in all the diversity of their identities and traditions” the people of Tiger’s Bay, or the Shankill Road or Portadown.

Having now begun to speak out and make their case, the Republic’s oldest minority is faced with a long road ahead. On the one hand there is the campaign for individual rights – such as the right to British citizenship. On the other hand, much of what the minority aspires to affects not just the individual, but rather Irish society as a whole. Sacred cows on all sides face slaughter. In asserting that Ireland is a part of these islands, rather than apart from them, the minority poses a direct challenge to the sacredest cow of all. There is much to be done – and interesting times ahead.

© David Christopher 2002 Reproduced with permission